It’s not because of Dr. Bonk – his work is very interesting.

It’s the classroom. I wanted to attend to . . . → Read More: Leaving an open online class]]> I’m leaving Curt Bonk’s open online class “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success”, which started this week. It’s a class about retaining, motivating and engaging online students, and I’m leaving because I’m not motivated and not engaged.

It’s not because of Dr. Bonk – his work is very interesting.

It’s the classroom. I wanted to attend to see the new CourseSites from Blackboard, which is being touted as Bb’s “open” LMS. Maybe it would be innovative! A new LMS. I’m always very interested in learning management systems, and what they can do.

Well, it’s the same old Blackboard, with more white space, nicer fonts and some cool icons.

First assignment included two 44-page pdf files that were expensive to print and difficult to read online since they were double-spaced. Oh.

Well, OK. I went over to the discussion to introduce myself, and oh dear. Same threaded discussion – very 1999. With each iteration of Bb, I find it harder to believe they’ve done nothing with forums. Each person had started their own “thread” to introduce themselves, necessitating opening each one at a time or collecting those on the page.

Only those on the page can be collected. There are 30 pages of introductions.

A sense of chore, of overwhelming ennui, engulfed me. I saw that you can also blog instead. That’s good! I can blog as I go, on my own blog! And everyone will read it, and there will be comments, and I can comment on theirs! Oh….

I’m not going to blog inside a closed system, even if it’s open at the moment. Yes, I could add a link to my own blog to the wiki, but that’s not exactly integrated into the course. Pretty evident, then, that the main discussion would be in those horrible forums.

It’s only for a month. No, I can’t. I don’t use Bb anymore for exactly this reason. I will be happy to read Bonk’s works, on my own, and blog about them. I’ll miss the community. No, I won’t. I can’t miss this many people.

I’m spoiled. I blame George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Alec Couros. I blame Jim Groom. I’m used to aggregated blogs, embedded media, distributed conversation. I think of these things as being what open, online classes are all about. I blame my own class at Pedagogy First!.

You’ll say I didn’t give it a chance. You’ll say I’m being too picky. You’ll say…well, I don’t know what you’ll say, since I won’t be in the class.

I’ve got it. They’re like Lego*.

Communicating Change Lee Henrikson

Using Skype in the Online Classroom Therese Kanai &  Melissa Holmberg

Creative Crossroads: Learning Partners Collaborate Selia Karsten

Keynote: SMILE (Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment) Paul Kim

Creative Infusion: When Academia Meets Creativity Jennifer Harrison & Crystal Hofegartner

Student Attitudes Toward the Addition of a Social Media Tool to Increase Social Presence in an Online Learning Environment Joan S Leafman & Kathleen . . . → Read More: Learning at TCC (and why you shouldn’t clean up your profile)]]>  

Sessions attended: Communicating Change Lee Henrikson Using Skype in the Online Classroom Therese Kanai &  Melissa Holmberg Creative Crossroads: Learning Partners Collaborate Selia Karsten Keynote: SMILE (Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment) Paul Kim Creative Infusion: When Academia Meets Creativity Jennifer Harrison & Crystal Hofegartner Student Attitudes Toward the Addition of a Social Media Tool to Increase Social Presence in an Online Learning Environment Joan S Leafman & Kathleen Mathieson Managing Issues of Safety, Privacy, Copyright, and Technological Change in Web 2.0 Instruction: Lessons Learned from Teaching a YouTube Course Chareen Snelson Digital Dirt: How to Survive and Thrive in a World with Social Media Michele Hinto-Riley & Erica Arnold-Wyche Designing and Evaluating an Online Resource Site for Distance Educators Billy Meinke Technology Integration & Training for Online Course Development: A Needs Assessment Melissa Kunitzer Providing Qualitative Feedback in Online Teaching with Minimal Effort, yet Reaping Great Benefits Brooke Estabrook-Fishinghawk Going Paperless: Advantages & Challenges of the Paperless Classroom Derek Snyder Using Teamwork in an Online Course: Five Useful Strategies Leanne Chun and Lani Uyeno Promoting Continuous Quality in Online Teaching: Implementing A Comprehensive Faculty Development Program Holly McCracken & Eileen Dittmar Visual E-Communications to Enliven Collaborative E-Learning Janet Salmons OpenCourseWare and Open Educational Resources: Forward to Credentialed Learning Outcomes? Jason Caudill Applying Delta Theory to analyze online communities Hery Yanto The Organic Gardening: An Online Course Design Rachel Kirkland and Jordan Day Teaching with Technology Centers Kasey Fernandez & Salynn Kam

I attended many sessions at the wonderful TCC Teaching, Colleges and Community conference out of the University of Hawaii (yes, everyone always groans that this conference is online instead of in Hawaii!). Several made a distinct impression on me and will change my practice.The first of these was Creative Infusion: When Academia Meets Creativity, just as a good reminder that we should encourage student creativity in all our classes and Managing Issues of Privacy, a good reminder on that subject. But the one that really got me participating (and it was easy to do with TCC’s structure) was Digital Dirt: How to Survive and Thrive in a World With Social Media. The big concern was that students post party pictures and other questionable material all over their social media sites, and employers increasingly look at these sites before they decide whether to hire someone. The advice was that we need to share this information with students and encourage them to clean up their act. It is our job to caution them. At first I was nodding my head. But I’ve been reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. People who use social media a lot, especially young people, use it in a very personal way. Their profiles and status updates are tied to their image of themselves and their relationships with their peers. It’s not just a matter of not thinking ahead to an employment interview. It’s that the identity of some young people is embedded in their social media, and that the authenticity of these identities is extremely important in their lives and in trusting each other. In addition, the advice seemed to encourage cookie-cutter profiles, without sins or mistakes. If I were an employer seeking a creative person, or one who’d been around the block, or one with life experience, these profiles would leave me cold. If Ray and Anderson are correct about the Cultural Creatives, then the workers who will be most in demand are those who can not only think outside the box, but create a new box. They will be artistic, open-minded, and authentic. A clean Facebook profile will be an illusion and a sham. I suppose if you want a job that does not require a Cultural Creative, but rather a bean counter or bureaucrat, you might want to make sure your profile was free of sin. I don’t feel I should be responsible for encouraging students to create a profile designed to impress someone hiring that sort of person. The other significant session for me was Promoting Continuous Quality in Online Teaching: Implementing A Comprehensive Faculty Development Program, because it taught me that not all for-profit institutions offer lousy faculty development, creating stables of ill-qualified part-timers to teach canned classes. I totally admit to extreme prejudice on this issue, but Holly McCracken and Eileen Dittmar are clearly doing incredible work at Cappella, creating faculty development staffed with volunteers who just want to help each other teach better. Experienced online faculty sharing with those who are new is the heart of their system as it is of our Program for Online Teaching. I was delighted.

Sessions attended:

Blend Your Own Faculty Development Program Using Open Components from Blended Learning Toolkit Kelvin Thompson and Linda Futch

How to Successfully Evaluate Blended Learning Chuck Dziuban and Patsy Moskai

Openness in Blended Learning: Perfecting the Blend David Wiley

Private Investment, Technology and American Education Marc Parry, Tom Cavanaugh, Anthony Picciano, Alexandra Pickett and Karen Swan

Blended Learning Scale, Ambivalence & Analytics Chuck Dziuban and . . . → Read More: Learning at (?) Sloan-C]]>

Sessions attended:

Blend Your Own Faculty Development Program Using Open Components from Blended Learning Toolkit
Kelvin Thompson and Linda Futch

How to Successfully Evaluate Blended Learning
Chuck Dziuban and Patsy Moskai

Openness in Blended Learning: Perfecting the Blend
David Wiley

Private Investment, Technology and American Education
Marc Parry, Tom Cavanaugh, Anthony Picciano, Alexandra Pickett and Karen Swan

Blended Learning Scale, Ambivalence & Analytics
Chuck Dziuban and Patsy Moskai

Blending with Social Media
Tanya Joosten

Faculty Blended Learning Process: How Instructors Learn to Teach Adult Students in a Blended Program
Karen Skibba

  I wasn’t at Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference in the usual sense; I was a “virtual attendee”, an experience I’ll cover in another post. Some of the take-aways for me included the leadership role of the University of Central Florida in these subjects, including the open access Blended Learning Toolkit, which provides professional development resources to UCF and beyond, with everything licensed Creative Commons. Just the whole attitude of the university seems to be right on target.

Chuck Dziuban‘s approach impressed me enormously. During the first session, about assessment, he noted that faculty trying to put their multiple-choice quizzes online said their students were cheating and his response was “duh”. One can’t simply lift an on-site element (like a paper test) into an online environment – there must be adaptation.I was somewhat disappointed in David Wiley’s keynote, not because everything he said wasn’t true, but because I had heard almost all of it before and was hoping for a newer, more radical perspective.

The plenary session on Private Investment, Technology and American Education was excellent in grappling with the moral and procedural complexities of private funding for public education. Often this funding, desperately desired by public universities having their budgets cut, comes with unwieldy, unethical, or impossible strings attached. Being told to build a building, or have results within 15 months, or perform class visits when classes are not in session, were big challenges.

In addition, Tony Picciano was very clear about the influence that donors like the Gates Foundation have over the Department of Education, and how Congress does nothing about it since many of them concerned about education want this money coming in also. Companies work through bureaucrats, not educators. Shared work doesn’t count: Tom Cavanaugh at UCF noted that the sharing they do of work like the Toolkit influences schools that aren’t partners to the grant, so it isn’t included. The goal of not “selling your soul” when accepting private grants was clearly a difficult objective, and the choice of not taking the money might be difficult when public funding sources expect the private sector to jump in.

I took the most notes on Chuck Dziuban’s portion of the presentation on ambivalence in student evaluation of blended classes, because I think his work applies to all classes. His research shows that students who either love or hate a class or teacher tend to focus only on two factors: the course landscape and instructor engagement. Those who are ambivalent (i.e. there were some things they really liked and others they didn’t) create an averaged evaluation score that tells us nothing. These ambivalent perspectives take into consideration a larger number of factors that are important to assessing quality, including the course rhythm, expectation rules, assessment of their progress. When students are only partly happy with a class, there is much more information. We tend to interpret a middling student evaluation as meaning the faculty performance is middling, when it may be instead balancing good and bad aspects. I saw a big argument here for not considering the aggregate of a student evaluation at all.

Dziuban also noted, to my relief and frustration (since I’ve been trying to figure it out) that there is no set pattern to why students withdraw from classes. The biggest indicator of the likelihood of failure, his research shows, is cumulative GPA. The modality of the class, its level, the class size, gender, ethnicity, age, etc. mattered far less or not at all.

Tanya Joosten’s presentation on social media for educators (the title of her current book) was excellent. She has done work on the things many of us know but didn’t have proof for: students spend the most time in Facebook, don’t check email at all, and use mobile technologies. Having been worried about the creepy treehouse effect, I was happy to learn that Facebook could be effective in the way I’m using it (Groups, not friending) and that I could expand use further with Pages (I need to look into how this stuff shows up on students’ Walls, which is what they want – I know Groups don’t). Finding ways to text message assignment reminders and using Facebook helps students stay organized – it’s their planner, clearly. And they don’t use Google Plus.

Overall, a good conference with some severe limitations to communications, which I’ll be discussing elsewhere. ]]> http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/04/learning-at-sloan-c/feed/ 0 http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/04/its-a-facebook-thing-and-ignorance-of-the-internet/ http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/04/its-a-facebook-thing-and-ignorance-of-the-internet/#comments Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:36:28 +0000 Lisa http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/?p=1652 Yesterday these Kony posters appeared in our neighborhood. I knew they would get torn down as soon as people saw them this morning, so I went out early to take some snaps.

As I pulled up to the first one, a man (good-looking, maybe in his late 20s?) got out of his car and headed toward the . . . → Read More: “It’s a Facebook thing” and ignorance of the internet: a short story]]> Yesterday these Kony posters appeared in our neighborhood. I knew they would get torn down as soon as people saw them this morning, so I went out early to take some snaps.

As I pulled up to the first one, a man (good-looking, maybe in his late 20s?) got out of his car and headed toward the sign. He leaned down to my open window and said, “do you know anything about this?”.

I said, “No.”

He said, “I think I know the kids who did it. It was kids.”

“Oh.” I said

“They don’t bother me.” I said. He looked puzzled.

“I figure it means they’re thinking”, I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s just it,” he said. “They’re not thinking. It’s a Facebook thing.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it will make other people in the neighborhood think, and that would be a good thing.”

Pause, as he turns away.

“I’m an educator,” I say, “It goes with the territory.”

He looks at me curiously. “Wait a minute,” he says, “Are you a teacher?” (This immediately reminded me why I never use the word “educator” – I have no idea why I did.)

“Yes.” “Where?” “MiraCosta.”

“I think I had you,” he said. (I avoided sighing – people saying that to me used to mean something completely different.)

“Then,” I said, “You should know I like this sort of thing.” He smiles and rips the sign down, going back to his car. I drove to another part of the neighborhood to get more snaps before he finished his morning endeavors.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a colleague who is otherwise very intelligent about the world. In fact, he teaches about culture. I was complaining at how few of our colleagues have any understanding of new media, the internet itself, or  the role of these elements in our culture.

He said, “Well, I’m not on Facebook, if that’s what you mean.”

“But your students are,” I said. “Don’t you think you should get in there and try to understand what’s going on? You could learn more about how they think.”

“I don’t like Facebook,” he says.

So I’m thinking (as I imagine the FB “dislike” thumbs-down in my head), is this how we deal with this? We don’t want to use it ourselves, so we aren’t interested in understanding it? Do we think the same thing about other kinds of knowledge and understanding? How do we teach our students if we don’t understand something that has become so quickly a major part of our culture? What do we teach our students if we don’t understand this?

It’s not “a Facebook thing”. Or if it is, it means we need to understand what being a Facebook thing means, and that it doesn’t necessarily translate as “doing what my friends do” or “living in a different space”. Facebook, and the whole internet, affects our lives every day, whether we have accounts or not. And when students (and former students) and teachers don’t get that, it’s a bad thing.

There are wide-open moments on Scheinman’s “Devil’s Ink” that, taken out of context, could pass for modern composed music.

Which made me wonder how a piece of a song . . . → Read More: In search of context]]> On PBS radio, Kevin Whitehead’s review of Jenny Scheinman’s ‘Mayhem’ included a quick comment that if one of the songs was “taken out of context” it would be heard differently.

There are wide-open moments on Scheinman’s “Devil’s Ink” that, taken out of context, could pass for modern composed music.

Which made me wonder how a piece of a song could be taken out of context? It would have to be informed by other songs or other knowledge.

Of course, an individual song can be taken out of context — bands like Pink Floyd and Radiohead didn’t want their songs to be sold separately in iTunes. Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare is meant to be heard in a certain order – so is Queen’s Night at the Opera. Album rock is based on the album, not the individual songs.

But context can be important for bits of knowledge as well. And this connects (really it does) to my students coming to class not having done their reading.

I complained about this on John Mak’s blog, in answering his query about flipping the classroom, where I described the problem in my hybrid class, where lectures and readings are online, and on-site time is for discussion:

Several students seem to “forget” to do the online work at all, having been “trained” to just show up in a class. The time in class, now joyfully turned over to “discussion”, doesn’t go as well when students don’t do the online readings.

The readings provide context for what we talk about in class. Reading about what happened (yes, including some facts) provides the context for both the primary sources and further discussion.

And yet, there is no reason for a person to realize they do not possess context for their ideas. They may think their thoughts spring from an internal source, without connection to their culture, upbringing, or surroundings. Only their presence is required to engage in criticism, on any subject.

Such disconnected idea-building could represent a moment of spirituality, but is more likely to express simple ignorance.

People who cannot think within a pattern of intellectual endeavor (mathematical, historical, literary, scientific) lack the context within which to put the bits and pieces of information they may encounter.

The Nowhere Man in Yellow Submarine knew a million details, but had no knowledge.

So the entire purpose of education is to provide context. Or, at least, it is its central purpose. Providing facts and forcing memorization, we say, doesn’t do that – you only learn the details. But could enough facts, stuck together however tenuously, create a net that becomes a context? Can we rearrange the songs to make an album?

Or is it necessary to have someone else (expert, professor, teacher, curator) create the album, so that we hear the individual tunes as a contextual package?

Perhaps the controversy between the constructivist or connectivist pedagogies and the instructivist pedagogy is mostlya bout context. The constructivists and connectivists want the students to build their own contextual package, inductively, and the instructivists want to provide the contextual package, within which students fit the specifics, deductively.

Either way, it seems to me, the goal is the same.

I have also not been a big fan of tweeting “history”, in historical reinactments done via Twitter. I critiqued the approach heartily almost exactly two years ago.

However, I . . . → Read More: Telecommunications, Twitter and Titanic]]> No, I am not a big fan of the James Cameron film, mostly because of the awful script and the inability of the two leads to rise above it.

I have also not been a big fan of tweeting “history”, in historical reinactments done via Twitter. I critiqued the approach heartily almost exactly two years ago.

However, I have now been to two museum exhibits of artifacts from the Titanic (including the current one in San Diego), and tonight I sit here watching Twitter as the Carpathian steams in to pick up survivors, and I have to say, it’s ridiculously riveting to watch the disaster unfold on Twitter.

I have followed both Real-Time Titanic  and TitanicVoyage  out of the  UK publishing house The History Press for the last couple of days. Both have done a great job in creating a suspenseful account of what professional historians like to call (often disdainfully), “popular” history, Real-Time Titanic using a third-person, journalistic style and TitanicVoyage marking posts by the type of tweeter (#captain, #crew, #thirdclass) for an even more harrowing first-person tone.

As with most of the popular history I’ve enjoyed, I was drawn to a single aspect of the subject, in this case the problem with the Marconi wireless radio just a day before they hit the iceberg.

Apparently, the transmitter went down.

And apparently, they broke the rules to fix it.

Naturally, this sent me on a hunt for rules about Marconi wireless, and the stories of the young men who worked the radios. I found a respected article by Parks Stephenson, a fascinating page on the wireless telegraphists, a website “specialising in radio aspects of the Titanic disaster since 1999“, and a recent article from Atlantic Monthly on the importance of radio to the survivors. None of the creators of this stuff are, to my knowledge, professional historians. They are enthusiasts, of history and radio.

Even if only parts of the stories are true, it is possible that a couple of young men took apart a radio against some sort of policy to make sure it transmitted, and if they hadn’t then a day later when Titanic hit an iceberg they might not have been able to send the distress call.

Conclusions can thus be made about the value of mechanical tinkering, and not being afraid to break the rules, and professional pressure to do your job (hundreds of passenger-sent messages were sent from the ship by radio).

It’s harder to explain, though, the emotional impact of watching it unfold, in “real time” 100 years later, as if it were happening now and we could hear the screams of the people freezing to death yards from the lifeboats. There was a certain War of the Worlds aspect to it, even though Twitter is not really the radio and one couldn’t unknowingly follow the Twitter stream the same way people unknowingly tuned in to Welles’ show.

And again this odd use of Twitter makes me rethink the role of stories and history and the enthusiasts who put it all together, and I’m filled with nothing but respect for their work.

Back in the 1960s, there was an argument at universities about “relevance”, with student activists claiming that what they were learning was not . . . → Read More: No, I won’t make it “relevant”]]> You know, I teach History. (I capitalize the word because I mean the formal academic discipline, not the subject of the History Channel or that category in the New York Times Review of Books.)

Back in the 1960s, there was an argument at universities about “relevance”, with student activists claiming that what they were learning was not relevant to their lives. Their work, and that of the faculty who supported them, has given us fields like women’s studies, Native American studies, Asian philosophy, sociology of the family, etc.

One of the courses that was criticized most at the time was Western Civilization. It was seen as promoting Dead White Guys history, leaving out women, poor people, and other elements of society. It was seen as elitist, Euro-centric, and, worst of all, irrelevant. Although the course itself did not die (I’m teaching it), the materials and approaches changed. Women scientists and scholars of the past, social groups that had little say in texts, and even international influences, gradually have worked their way into lectures, textbooks, and scholarly focus. This is taking several generations, despite the fact that social history became a major field in the 1940s. It is only recently that you can find textbooks that put women and ordinary people within the narrative, instead of in boxes and “features” that continue to marginalize (quite literally) their contribution to the flow of history. (Children, by the way, have yet to appear as historical actors – I hope I see that before my career ends, but I doubt it.)

At the same time as this necessary shift has been taking place, the desire for relevance has gradually entered the pedagogy of college classrooms as well, with professors of traditional subjects being encouraged to not only make learning more “active”, but to provide lots of connections to today’s issues and the daily lives of students. We are asked to examine ways in which our subject is applicable to students’ lives, and the implication is that we should adjust our teaching and our subject matter accordingly.

I find it contradictory that just as we are finally creating a history of adult society as a whole, a history that includes people who may not be like ourselves, we are seeing pressure to teach history as more directly connected to the lives of our students. And I say…no.

It’s not that I don’t think current events aren’t a good way to talk about history. I do that whenever I have a chance to talk with students, in class or out of class. It’s that the purpose of history is not just to understand today’s events; it’s to understand who we are. And by that I don’t mean only who we are today, but who we are in the context of a history that extends back, way back, beyond ourselves.

To teach a person, especially a young person who’s lived 20 years or less, a history that is relevant to their daily lives is, quite literally, short-sighted. Their daily lives are simply too small. Older people have small lives, too, which may be confined by lack of knowledge about things that don’t seem to immediately concern them.

Many of my students go to college, or go back to college, to get real-world skills and a job that pays well. They see those G.E. areas that don’t interest them as hoops to jump through. Their horizons are narrow and many are quite content that way. Only a few are, as we say in our superior professorial tone, “here to learn”.

The “relevance” approach also plays into the idea of strategic learning — students believe they only need to learn things they see as immediately relevant to their lives. That’s very superficial.

To me, the purpose of higher education is to broaden people’s horizons, not work within them.

I don’t want to make history relevant to their lives today, to who they are today – I want to make it relevant to the educated person they wish to become. And if they don’t wish to become educated, then it’s my job to try anyway, to introduce them to ideas beyond themselves, from times in which they haven’t lived and thus find difficult to understand. I want to show them universal ideas, and controversial ideas, and interpretations of the past in an effort to have them understand some of the context in which they live as historical human beings, not just themselves and their small world.

The relevance of that perspective, if they see it at all, will not play out until long after they leave my class, as they enter the flow of history to make their own contribution. And when they look back, they need to see more than themselves.