Category: The Technology

Discussion “Triggers”

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I found it — the blog post from eLearning Connection that began my use of multimedia triggers for online discussions. I have just finished finding and adding in all the triggers (teasers? prompts? I’ve been calling them “ticklers”, which is more seductive) for my fall classes. These include:

An actor playing a Saxon upset at the Norman invasion, from the National Archives Learning Curve.


A QTRV of Canterbury Cathedral

An animation of throwing things while stationary and in motion from UNSW Physclips, Australia

<— This painting

Animations of the Western Front from the BBC


A video of the Sioux Ghost Dance performed for Buffalo Bill’s show from the Library of Congress

This photo —–>

A 1950s fashion show

And this video of a computer game recreation of the Battle of Agincourt:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH1xp0-32pI]

Should be interesting discussions this semester!

Quotation for today

Lisa M Lane

<![CDATA[“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.”

— Theodore Roosevelt]]>

Explaining RSS again

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

My Program for Online Teaching newsletter this month contained the following advice:

Consider using RSS feeds for keeping track of trends in your discipline. All this means is having a page on the web that shows the “headlines” and summaries of newspaper articles, journals, blogs and other updated information as it comes in. One easy way to start is to go to Yahoo, set up an account, and click on My Yahoo! to create your page. You can even add movie times for the theatres near you, weather reports, and baseball scores! RSS just means that the source of the information releases it to be picked up by your page.

I had such trouble myself understanding RSS feeds and what they could do. I saw Donald Luck present it to me at a NSSA conference, I asked a few smart people, and I still didn’t get it. A couple of things helped. This video from Common Craft on YouTube:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU]
Also, this web page by Stephanie Quilao: Explaining RSS the Oprah Way (from which this graphic was taken).

Then this morning, I was reading an article called Web 0.1 from Technology Review, and it mentioned a future vision from 22 years ago claiming that personal computers would include “news from several wire services” and I thought that’s it!. It’s like teletype! During the 1950s particularly, teletype machines received and printed news by subscription, for wire services like Associated Press. The http://www.thebig8.net/newsfx.wavsound of the machine was popular as a background for TV news shows and radio.

During the 1980s, I worked in a bank, and one of my jobs was checking the teletype machine, which would start printing by itself suddenly at odd times. So that’s what using RSS is. It’s subscribing to a service that feeds the news to you. Without the clack-clack-clack.

Good network, bad network

Lisa M Lane

At work, we’re all on a network, linked by T-1 lines. This provides quick and easy access to services on the Local Area Network. Many networks now use VoIP (voice over internet protocol), so that digital phone service and computing services can be served from one location.

      
           Flikr photo by mouton.rebelle

The Good: LANs tend to be very fast, and uploading to the system is usually easy. For network administrators, they provide security through limits on users and pass-coded access. VoIP can provide universal messaging, enabling you to listen to voicemail from your email, and hear email by calling in to your voicemail.

The Bad: Any computer connected to a network should be considered to have a hard drive exposed to the whole network. Administrators can access the desktop computers easily, and track all activity. VoIP without a landline means emergency access is limited to the network, so if the electricity goes out, you may not be able to call 911. All phone messages and email are recorded inside the system, providing an administrator easy access to all communications.

Advice: Enjoy the advantages of a network (especially the speed), but be careful what you search and view on the internet, and what you keep on your desktop hard drive (a personal flash or portable hard drive is a good idea). All communications (voice, internet and phone) should be considered as publicly accessible. The network may be secure, but your work isn’t if it’s attached to it, either with a wire or wirelessly. As with national policy, security measures inevitably entail loss of freedom and privacy.

Moodle: Students rating forum posts

Lisa M Lane

One of the most useful features in Moodle, apparently enabled by default in 1.7, is the ability for students to rate forum posts, using any “scale” developed by the instructor. My students rate forum posts using a scale that includes choices like these:

  • Open Question
  • Informational Statement
  • Reflection on Material
  • Engages Others
  • Adds to Understanding
  • Uses Class Resources
  • Late Post
  • Off Topic

We can thus engage in a discussion of what makes a meaningful contribution to a forum, as well as the topic for the week.

In Moodle 1.7, this was just a matter of a checkbox called “Use ratings” in the updating of a Forum. In 1.8, the establishment of user “roles” means that the setting must be enabled as a Permission for a Student role. The “rate post” feature thus cannot be enabled by a Teacher unless the Administrator has enabled it in the Teacher role to override settings *and* specifically override settings for students (see Using Moodle forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=72179).

This was designed to make it easier to customize access and use, but it sure is cumbersome. Without getting the setting changed, only Teachers can rate posts, and they may not be able to see that students can’t do it anymore if they’re accustomed to Moodle 1.7. And it took me awhile with Moodle documentation to figure out that overriding the Student role can be done at the course level, so long as Teachers are permitted to do it. Because Teachers can also override Student roles (if permitted) for each forum, I thought at first I’d have to do this for all 16 forums in each of 3 courses (you do the math).

But really, it’s worth it to get your Admin to enable this permission if you’re a teacher in Moodle. The pedagogical opportunities of students rating each others’ posts (and yours!) are too cool to pass up!

Planning to Divorce the CMS

Lisa M Lane 7 Comments

Yeah, I’ll leave someday. I’m sure my second Course Management System knows that already. It’s not that it’s been a bad relationship (not like my first CMS — that was brutal — we’re not on speaking terms), but some day I’ll have to move on. I’ve gotten a lot of advice lately, reading some self-help gurus: Brian Lamb, George Siemens, Stephen Downes.

And now I’ve found the last tool to break the chain. It’s called Engrade, and it’s a web 2.0 gradebook (thanks to Sharon Davis and the WOW2 folks for posting the link the other night). I haven’t tried Engrade. It may not work. I don’t care. The fact that it’s there means there will be more apps like it. That’s all I want.

I can now do everything offered by a CMS outside a CMS. I can patch together the whole thing using webapps. I can mix-and-match, I can blend. I can do it my way (anyone will tell you that’s the way I do everything anyway!). I can create and have my students use and create pages with widgets in Protopage, discussion boards with QuickTopic, IM with Meebo or Adium (for Mac), conference calls in Skype, RSS feeds in Feedraider, blogs at Edublogs, wikis at pbwiki or in <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org" MediaWiki, slideshows at Bubbleshare and VoiceThread, annotated photos at Flickr, presentations and zillions of other things at Zoho. And all for my very favorite price: free!

No, I won’t move out right away. But my current CMS better start taking out the trash.

Protopage and Pageflakes and Netvibes, Oh My

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

And hey, I now know that’s a snowclone. Good thing all this web education isn’t going to waste!

I am currently comparing Personal Start Pages, but for communicating with others, not just setting up my personal learning environment (though later I’ll do that too, I’m sure). As I play, I have compared these three products. What I want is:

  • the option to make the page public
  • a block where I can post one or several specific videos
  • a block that shows comments and discussion, preferrably right there though it’s OK if it links out to another board
  • a block where I can put in whatever HTML I want
  • no ads
  • customized layout
  • boxes showing RSS feeds and lots of ’em
  • a way to show a web page, like the Program for Online Teaching page
  • and how ’bout my del.icio.us tag cloud?

Turns out all three had no ads, and a way to show a web page. Then they started to differ.

Protopage gave me my own URL for my page, which got me wanting that too!

  • I could share any page using the tabs
  • no YouTube video block specifically, but it let me embed a video with height and width in an HTML block
  • has a comment box right there, but it’s announcing, not interactive
  • I can display and combine feeds with no limit
  • widget resizing and arrangements not problem
  • challenge: the scroll bars get tangled in Firefox on the Mac
  • cool things: it doesn’t make you use the username to log in, just the password (I can never remember my damn usernames), and any user can adjust widget boxes

Pageflakes
can do public, private or group pages and allows invited people to edit. It also gave me my own URL for my page.

  • I couldn’t figure out a way to post just one video, and
  • I could find no open HTML “flake” to put code in
  • Message Board right there (in which I got a comment immediately)
  • RSS feeds limited to 25
  • cool things: web page flake can display any web page, and can have flake showing del.icio.us tag cloud

Netvibes was the one I struggled with the most, though I was able to do a lot. No URL, and I can’t show you my page because I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I had to sign in to do anything at all. This one made me feel stupid.

  • No YouTube widget but can use HTML External Widget for videos or HTML
  • can do an HTML note
  • no built in message board, but has phpBB discussion forum monitor, so I could see an external discussion if it were in phpBB
  • it can show the first line of feeds, but has 10 maximum
  • can display any web page

So….I’m still thinking about it.

Today’s RSS feed is yesterday’s teletype

Lisa M Lane

<![CDATA[I will be posting about this in my Online Teaching blog, but this is history so it goes here too (the very first case of blog overlap for me!). For years, I had trouble understanding RSS feeds and, once I understood them, explaining the idea to others.

Call it an “aha!” moment. This morning, I was reading an article called Web 0.1 from Technology Review, and it mentioned a future vision from 22 years ago claiming that personal computers would include “news from several wire services” and I thought that’s it!. It’s like teletype! During the 1950s particularly, teletype machines received and printed news by subscription, for wire services like Associated Press. The sound of the machine was popular as a background for TV news shows and radio.

During the 1980s, I worked in a bank, and one of my jobs was checking the teletype machine, which would start printing by itself suddenly at odd times. So that’s what using RSS is. It’s subscribing to a service that feeds the news to you. Without the clack-clack-clack.]]>

Snowden on Humanity and Web 2.0

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

I’ve been listening to the podcast of Dave Snowden’s presentation at the Future of Education 2007 conference (on my new RCA mp3 player), and it’s given me a new perspective on the down side of all this social networking activity. Here’s some of his key points, with my comments.

  • The quality of academic work used to be based on the nature of published papers, but this has now been devalued because scholars work on publishing many small papers in the plethora of new journals, ignoring any kind of depth. They now specialize is small areas, with little or no linking to other fields — few generalists exist, instead we have collections of experts. The explicit detail involved inhibits the birth of new ideas.

    I have recently concluded a research project with lots of sources, and was astonished at the sheer number of journals (a few are listed here) dedicated to online learning. Many of the articles were little studies based on very small research samples, so they contained findings that I thought were of somewhat limited use. Thousands of papers were able to cite thousands of such specialized other papers. I got a real illusory, house-of-cards feeling doing my reading, along with a suspicion that any idiot can get published in this field.

  • Virtual worlds (such as Second Life or multi-user games like World of Warcraft) contain a representation of learning rather than real learning, as they are based on a representation of real life. People spend more time playing with the system (adjusting their avatars) then actually doing innovative work. The communication is fundamentally deficient because it relies only on visual representation and text, while true social interaction relies on all the senses. Research indicates that the brain was designed not to process information, but to process patterns. Scent, touch and peripheral vision are crucial to this patterning.

    This makes me wonder about online learning in general. I began to realize that some of my colleagues’ resistance to teaching online may be a deep understanding that since these elements are lacking in that environment, online teaching and learning are less “real” to them. I’ve seen real learning take place online, of course (I would hardly continue doing this if I hadn’t!) but I now wonder if what I’m doing is creating only representations of college classes.

  • Social computing has good uses and areas of great concern. Blogs increase communication, but also increase the intimacy of communication: they are personal and emotional. As people read each others’ blogs, they form communities of similar people, filtering out others, and use common tags to make communication easier, creating a tribal system. Wikis are useful for creating stockpiles of information, but validation is a serious problem. The initial enthusiasm and freedom of such collections and editing possibilities can give rise to fanaticism and reactionism (such as Conservapedia) and acts of vandalism (spamming). The tyranny of crowds becomes the validating mechanism: if a huge group believes something, however wrong, it is seen to be true. At a small scale, with a small user group, this is not that significant. But as scale increases and we become reliant on the information (as many have with Wikipedia), validation becomes a significant issue.

    I had been thinking that Wikipedia was as good or better as other sources because so many people were involved, and people who really cared did the entries. I still see the possibility for diffusion of bias through participation, total objectivity being impossible. But the persistence of irrational thinking in our society today being encouraged by such sources of “information” is indeed downright frightening to consider. In the past decade, I have witnessed amazing acts of irrationality on the part of our government and the people in this country, that this issue concerns me now more than it used to. When I was younger, I was a great deal more of a cultural relativist than I am now. Perhaps it takes a while for an open, tolerant, educated person to see certain points of view as damaging, or even evil.

  • Issues of cognitive development of users need consideration, since the ages for brain plasticity are between 2-3 years old (language development) and puberty (social inhibition development). The tribal groupings necessary for survival in primitive cultures can be literally short-circuited by lack of appropriate real-life social contact. In a university setting, the rote learning of particular skills is still needed, and self-directed learning is not necessarily appropriate.

    This helps me understand why children and young adults should not spend too much time in the virtual world, and why my few efforts at guiding the learning of those without any background information have been futile. Perhaps the skill is not, as I’ve been thinking, learning how to learn. Is this connected to all the trivial cell phone and twitter communications? Communication is so easy, and yet people have nothing to say. It never occurred to me that such humanist ideas were connected to today’s issues of the web and learning. My thanks to Dave Snowden.

Good Web Docs, Bad Web Docs

Lisa M Lane

My frustration with technology goes hand-in-hand with my enthusiasm for it. Shortly after I was introduced to computers, I found myself wondering why they couldn’t do the things I wanted them to do. With the advent of web-based applications, some of my complaints…um, requests…have been answered. But, as I teach my history students, every improvement in technology has a down side.

I write a lot, and one of my frustrations has been that I can’t have the same document settings exist automatically on multiple machines. I have to customize each installation of a word-processing program. Web-based programs like Zoho and Google Docs now make it possible to work, and work collaboratively, with text documents online. You can upload from any common program, and export back to it for printing or distribution. You can mark changes, made by you or your colleagues, in various colors, and keep all previous versions for reference.

The Good: Documents can be worked on from any computer with an Internet connection, changes are easy to see, all settings are preserved. Instead of carrying around your flash drive, you can work anywhere. If your documents are in one of the larger systems, you can find them with a search. You can work collaboratively instead of emailing versions back and forth.

The Bad: Since they’re on the internet, all documents can be hacked. It’s just not the place for anything private, or that shouldn’t be seen until it’s done (articles of publication, resumes, industrial design plans). You have to be on the internet to get to the document, and if it’s in one of the bigger systems, it can be searched for and stolen, or if it’s published someone else could even claim ownership of it. Some people can’t handle the collaborative aspect, and are afraid to edit other people’s work in an open forum where any stupid suggestions they make can be seen by everyone.

My advice: reserve your use of web apps for text to things that are OK to be seen in public as they evolve, but enjoy the convenience.

What would you like to do?

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

My big plan (yeah, I have one) is to get folks to recognize that the pedagogy must come before the technology. While technology can inspire us, at its base it is just a set of tools (or toolset, in the current lingo — like Sears Craftsman).

Good classroom teachers moving into an online environment tend to let the available/popular/supported technology dictate what they do. That’s like letting my wrench, screwdriver and tape measure tell me what to build (though that would make a good Disney movie). Isn’t it more natural to look at a piece of wood, determine it needs to be cut in half, then look for the right saw?

I have seen classroom teachers who excel at discussion and interaction give it up when they get online, and instead start loading Word documents into the preset Blackboard categories. What a waste! So many free tools are now available to do these things, and if a Course Management System must be used, these sites can be linked out from inside what one presenter at Ed-Media called “BlackCT”.

So whatcha want to do? Have students work in groups to create posters and present to the whole class? Try Bubbleshare, which lets students upload and edit slide programs, using the Groups feature of the CMS for discussion, or use Skype so the students can talk to each other as a group. Have students annotate visuals? You can use Flickr for that, either uploading the images yourself or having them do it. Have them study urban growth over time? Try Trulia Hindsight. Collaborate on a paper or wiki, or use free applications for planning, meeting or writing? Zoho is good.

More tools are available all the time. It’s about what you want to have happen. Dream first. Then find the socket wrench.

Ed-Media

Lisa M Lane

I have attended over a dozen sessions, and overall what I’m getting is that educators and technologists are excited by the opportunities and challenges of using the web to enhance learning experiences at all levels.edmedia.jpgThe opportunities are for collaboration (in small groups and globally), the creation of new knowledge, access to and participation in scholarship, and interactivity. Challenges include the widening of the gap between rich and poor, bad design, uncontrolled and vastly expanding information (much of which has dubious value), marketing interests, and security fears.

Some “take away” notes as I think about the sessions (names linked to conference abstract):

  • Providing specific instructions and a rubric grading elements such as relevance, originality, and writing quality improve online discussion participation quantity and quality. (Karen Swan, Kent State Univ)
  • Using a blog linked inside Blackboard can replace both Announcements and the lousy discussion forums, but is still instructor-controlled. (Raymond Kimball, US Military Academy at West Point)
  • A student project where sound was captured in neighborhoods and then linked to Google maps created high interest but not much analysis among students. (Claudia Engel, Stanford University)
  • We know what works for teaching: authentic tasks, problem-based learning, collaborative construction of knowledge, construction of presentation. What doesn’t work is talking heads, isolated learners and low-level outcomes. (Thomas Reeves, University of Georgia)
  • New online instructors need help with knowing how to adjust instruction, guide and motivate students online, manage their time, choose appropriate technologies, perceive online student personalities, and model the effective use of technology. (Brian Newberry, CSUSB)
  • When assessed on content acquisition, students prefer a standard web page of information to an inquiry-based “conversational agent”. (Bob Heller, Athabasca University)
  • A good first day of class activity is a scavenger hunt in groups for information from the course website. (Teresa Adams, Georgia Perimeter College)
  • E-Portfolios can be created in different kinds of software and used for keeping track of artifacts over a long period, for assessment and retrieval. (Joan Hanor, CSUSM and Jean Haefner, University of Wisconsin)
  • During a collaboration project between American and Danish students, cultural differences caused both learning and challenges. American students tended to base discussion on personal experience, be task-oriented, divide work according to who already knew the topic, and work fewer hours. Danish students based discussion on the assigned materials, focused on process, divided the work according to who needed to learn a topic, and worked more hours. (Ana-Paula Correira, Iowa State University)
  • Language students organized themselves into self-help groups to work on a course, having been provided with an audioconferencing tool. (John Pettit, Open University)
  • Second Life is not the only virtual world, but it has a huge group of educational participants. (Patricia McGee, University of Texas; Colleen Carmean, Arizona State University; Ulrich Rauch, University of British Columbia; Cyprien Lomas, The University of British Columbia)
  • Course Management Systems (now called Learning Management Systems) are cumbersome and problematic, especially when it comes to usability and transportability of content for both instructors and learners. What’s needed is smarter systems, ways to share materials, better integration, and pedagogical scaffolding (including ways to do remediation). Students still can’t create anything inside an LMS. (Patricia McGee, University of Texas, and Colleen Carmean, Arizona State University)

Upon arrival

Lisa M Lane

edmedia.jpg I have arrived at the Ed-Media conference, but I was still listening to Future of Education podcasts on the plane and it occurred to me that this is a very big field. Even prior to this huge conference, I have attended sessions, read blogs, written posts and listened to podcasts on subjects as diverse as college education, web 2.0, learning management systems, student habits, and technical administration. And really, I am just a college history instructor who loves teaching online. The blogs I read are written by a wide variety of people, as wide an assortment as those I will access at this conference. And each seems to have a different focus:

  • Instructional designers ask: how can we do this? what can we build?
  • Practicing teachers ask: how should we do this to enable learning?
  • Educational entrepreneurs ask: how can I make money off my ideas?
  • Educational adminstrators ask: how much will this cost and how easily is it implemented?
  • Scholars and doctoral students ask: what does the research show? how can I make a career in this field?
  • Innovators ask: what would be both cool and really useful?
  • Instructional leaders ask: how can this help teachers help students?

Can all these different perspectives add up to new knowledge? Some of these approaches rely on formal learning, and some do not. Some depend on professional connections or publication. The Ed-Media abstracts number in the hundreds, yet there appears to be no blog, wiki or social forums associated with the conference, unlike the two I’ve just attended, and I’ve gotten to the point where I find this odd. We shall see….

Advice for Beginners

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Margie White‘s presentation at the @ONE conference, though supposedly about Effective Time Management Techniques, was actually an outstanding primer on how to start teaching online.Her first main area was organization. First one must organize oneself, focusing without interruptions and avoiding multi-tasking unless you’re really good at it. You organize your students by being clear with instructions and answering class questions in a public place, like a discussion forum. Organizing materials can best be done by using your own file system, instead of typing things into the Course Management System. (This was dear to my heart, as I’ve been advising folks to do this for years!). I was also delighted to hear her advise that instructors organize and learn their technology: CMS, browser, manipulating images, html (also dear to my heart), accessibility, and screenshot programs.

Next came a discussion of consistency, in materials and course design so that students develop habits of moving through your course. She recommended repeating things in multiple places, using a template for presentation pages, and creating a pattern of online assignments (i.e. “due every Wednesday”). For good instructor workflow, Margie recommended creating the schedule around the instructors’ times for grading and working on the class.

Last was planning (though of course all of this requires planning!). An important point here was Margie’s encouragement for staggering the opening times of course content, as opposed to showing the whole 17 weeks at once. An entire course calendar may be used, but materials only made available a few weeks ahead, to prevent overload. One unique recommendation was keeping a text file of “canned” comments often given on assignments, which can also help retool instructions for the next semester. Working on student boundaries was part of planning: helping students keep up, and being flexible while not allowing them to ignore deadlines.

An outstanding review of what every instructor needs to know, and some ideas I’ll be using myself!

Two Conferences

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I am currently attending the @ONE 2007 Online Teaching Conference, being partly webcast from Ohlone College in Fremont, CA. I was quite reassured to hear David Balch’s presentation “A View from the Trenches“, especially when he talked about his answer to faculty concerns about student identity (“how do I know the online student is the person enrolled in the course?”). His answer was the same as mine: unless we check ID, we also don’t know whether the student who walks into our class is the same one on our rosters. Other heartening elements included the new focus on interactivity and recent surveys that show that faculty resistance to online instruction is fading.

The Future of Education 2007 conference (University of Manitoba) just ended (I am still catching up on the recordings). I was fascinated by Dave Cormier‘s presentation and the reaction to it. He presented on “Snowclones, Clichés and Memes”. . . sort of. There were presentation difficulties, since the technology he was using went down during the presentation, which focused on using online community to create learning, with the attendees acting as the students. A lot of attendees were trying to understand the topic itself, which related to the use of language. Cormier used a Pageflakes site, and showed the potential of such a feed aggregator for creating online learning communities.

Also wonderful was Brian Lamb‘s “DIY: Educators Gone Wild” presentation on mashups, Open, Connected, and Social, which made me feel better about mixing up all that pure educational content.

What I always find wonderful about these conferences, in addition to the friendly and helpful colleagues, is the chance to see what pieces of technology are being used by people who actually know what they’re doing! The Future of Education conference was so professional: synchronous and recorded sessions with Elluminate, Camtasia recordings, Moodle website with discussion forums, Pageflakes site, and podcasts so I can listen now that it’s over. And thanks to the presenters and organizers, I’ll look more carefully at Pageflakes (aggregator), SurveyMonkey (for surveys), Drupal (another CMS) and MediaWiki .

I also learn what I don’t like: at the @ONE conference, they used CCCConfer, which has the bother of audio over the telephone instead of through the computer speakers (I have a dial phone and thus a crick in my neck from today’s presentation). In Firefox, I had trouble getting the webcast to work even though I had the plug-in (WindowsMedia, naturally) installed. I had to reinstall it and use Safari instead to see the video, which was of excellent quality. The people at CVC are fabulous, though, and I was delighted to see people I knew, like Andrea Henne of SDCCD, and meet new folks just starting out in teaching online. One excellent presentation by Patricia Delich focused on tips for developing ones first online class. Good resources she provided included an assessment of technology skills for instructors, 10 activities before starting development [pdf], and a good online course rubric for both design and evaluation purposes.

I confess, however, I am suffering from Web 2.0 conference burn-out. Which is too bad, since I’m off to ED-Media in two weeks!

Course Management Systems: Limiting the Imagination

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Teaching is an imaginative art. One first envisions what one wants to do in class, then tries to make it happen.

A few years ago, I got into a polite discussion with an administrator about the necessity of the college supporting a variety of Course Management Systems, rather than restricting faculty to only one CMS. At the time, I was pretty naive. I assumed that anyone with any sense would realize that the freedom of faculty to teach in their own way was a primary consideration at an educational institution. My naivete evaporated as he explained to me that the CMS was like my physical classroom; it created basic limitations on my teaching and embodied parameters I could not change. I wouldn’t ask to move the walls of my classroom, would I? or expect the college to move the chalkboard, windows or doors?

I was less than convinced, and have long played the argument out in my head. To me, the computer itself was more analagous to the classroom, and within that I demanded academic independence to dream my dreams and achieve my goals. The technology itself already contained ample restrictions — every time I turned around, there was something I couldn’t do online. As I continued in online teaching, and found myself more and more frustrated with the additional limitations imposed on my pedagogical imagination by Blackboard, I entered another stage of naivete. Here I assumed that all online faculty, like myself, put their pedagogical goals first and tried to force the technology to do things to help students learn. Thus, they must be experiencing similar frustrations.

I have gradually been attaining a different level of awareness. In giving workshops and going to conferences, I noticed great similarities among the classes presented inside both Blackboard and WebCT. At places where faculty actually had their courses on display, they all looked very much alike. A few buttons might be changed, the theme color, but overall faculty seemed to be retaining the structural organization and intentions of the default settings.

This worried me. In these CMSs, the material is organized by type (“Course Documents”, “Quizzes”) rather than by topic or weeks. That is certainly not intuitive for those of us accustomed to a syllabus with a schedule. I wondered whether the CMS could be controlling the way a class was taught online, particularly among novice instructors. I began to develop a suspicion that at an introductory level, the CMS could actually determine the pedagogy due to several factors: insecurity about technological expertise, lack of knowledge about the CMS, and lack of dedication to pedagogical goals. The CMS was indeed being seen as the classroom, a physical set of immutable limitations.

A few months ago, I was looking at a colleague’s class as he told me about the limitations of WebCT, having changed over from Bb — he said he lost a certain feature he really liked, and indeed, I could see it was not there on his site. When I later looked at another instructor’s class in the same CMS, the feature was clearly evident on the main page. She showed me the settings she had used. The first instructor’s pedagogy had been hobbled simply because he didn’t know how to enable the feature. I also attended several workshops where I talked about Blackboard features that the instructors, most of whom had used Bb for years, didn’t know were there.

To get more information, I initiated a survey of Blackboard and WebCT users at a few local colleges. So far, results support the two top studies on the subject: University of Wisconsin (2003) and University System of Georgia (2005), which report that most faculty use the CMS for managerial tasks rather than to further their pedagogy. Class management features (gradebook, text upload, testing, email, discussion board) are used far more than interactive features (chat, discussion grading, virtual classrooms, reusable learning objects), even among experienced instructors. It was heartening that many were willing to customize the course menus and link externally from within the CMS, and most wanted to learn more about how to manage the system.

At the same time, I could see that few faculty use the many features of the web itself in their own work. Over half of the 57 faculty surveyed were unfamiliar with web elements such as RSS, blogs or wikis despite the fact that the same percentage have been using their CMS for three or more years. And again, that makes me wonder the extent to which the limitations of Course Management Systems are causing limitations in the pedagogical imagination. My work continues….

A Better Discussion

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I have been applying a technique to online discussion this semester that I have been very happy with, and I’ve been telling people about it. Discussion has been for a long time the unhappy weak spot in all my classes. I would create a discussion conference (Blackboard) or forum (Moodle) each week, with either questions to discuss or topics to work with. I tried to post a variety of topics so that the students would have options and would be able to discuss, rather than just post the same answer over and over. I required two posts per week, the first post by Wednesday midnight, and a second post replying to another student, by Sunday midnight.

In Blackboard, the limited threaded format caused serious boredom on my part. Every discussion every week in every class looked the same, my conference followed by nested links. I either had to click on each one to follow the topics, or “collect” them to read them all, but even sorting by date I couldn’t see who was replying to whom and it was all text and …. boring, boring, difficult and boring. So I wouldn’t go in that much because with forty students per class it was overwhelming, so I didn’t catch all the arguments and flaming, and when I went in to post myself to lead the discussion in a different direction, my own posts mixed in with all the others and were ignored, even when I started using an asterisk in the subject line so they would see it was me. Yuck. Partcipation would decline, and they weren’t really talking to each other anyway.

So I did some research. I read Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, Robert Tinker (Atwood Publishing 2000). The book had lots of great ideas, as you can see in my summary. I chose the role of “Leader of a Group Process” and posted a “tickler” on a single thread for each week (an idea I got from an article).

So for the week we study The West (my guinea pigs were US history students), I found a video clip from Edison labs of Native Americans from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. They are doing the Ghost Dance. All I asked was “What issues from this unit come to mind?”

From Sunday to Wednesday, I let them answer however they wanted. I notice over the past decade a tendency for college students to emphasize the affective aspects of their existence (how they “feel” about things, rather than rational thought). For this topic, students responded with pity (or callousness) — either way they were disturbed by the clip, which is what I intended. I let them wallow in affective areas till Thursday, when I posted. I summarized what they had said, freely quoting from their own posts, then guided the discussion toward a topic of historical perception and victimization. That let them know that:

1. I had read their posts and cared about what they said

2. I was guiding the discussion in a direction based on their own comments

3. the affective concerns would now be deepened into historical analysis

Because I was in Moodle, I could see all the posts on one screen, and made mine bold text, titling it “Take discussion from here, please”. Most did, replying to my summary/guidance post.

This technique has gotten me everything I want. I only go in to each discussion a couple of times per week, I can see the whole thing in one glance, I am getting faster at creating the summary with the quotes, and the discussion is deepening to the desired level at the end of each week. Participation levels are high. I’ve decided I prefer depth in discussion to breadth, especially since I wasn’t getting breadth anyway, and early student evaluations say they are happy.

Note: One student dropped the class early on. I emailed and asked if her dropping had anything to do with my class. She wrote back saying yes, she felt I was teaching us all to pity the Indians, and she didn’t come to college for that crap. (She had only seen the first part of the discussion.) I explained to her my entire pedagogy, including the affective aspects and my goal for analysis. She changed her mind and returned, and is now helping guide the discussion. There may be a lesson here for revealing ones pedagogical goals!

*Trapped* in Second Life

Lisa M Lane

I finally took a few hours to explore Second Life, about which I’ve attended many conference sessions over the last several months. I have learned that innovative instructors teach classes in this virtual world, and are turning it into a true VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). There are spaces like EduIsland, and people like Corwin Carillon (Nick Noakes‘ “in world” name) and Lyr Lobo (Cynthia Calongne) from New Media Consortium. Colleges are recreated entire campuses in SL, complete with student services.

So I wanted to get in and look around. Keep in mind I am NOT a gamer! I don’t even like games. The learning curve was high for me, since I am not at all attuned to virtual 3-D environments. A few weeks ago, I needed help from other people just to get my avatar looking like me (yes, other people walk around with tails and fox ears, but I wanted to be me — Lane is a last name in SL, so I got to be LisaM Lane). Yesterday I went to the NMC campus in SL to look around. It was a TRIP.

It was a combination of being a baby with a big brain, and taking some sort of drug where you’re not sure of the side effects. I had to learn how to walk, and turn my head, even after I went through the orientation. I fell down stairs, I learned to fly, I went parachuting without a parachute.

But then, I went into a building, to a meeting room, and managed to sit down in a chair (you right-click on the chair and click “Sit here” on the menu). When I tried to get up (“Stand up”), I got stuck in the chair. My legs were embedded in the seat and I could not moved forward or backward. It took me ten minutes, and finally I got out by sitting somewhere else.

How embarrassing! No one was in the room, thank goodness. Can you imagine me going into SL to meet like-minded tech-savvy professionals and getting STUCK IN A CHAIR? What if I had done what I read you must never do (choose “Take off…” thinking you will fly and accidentally click “clothing”, making you naked)? I would be in a professional environment, with professional colleagues, naked and stuck inside the furniture. Oh, the humiliation….

I did manage to do other things, like lie on the beach, jet ski, and ride a shark. These thrills did not erase the experience of being stuck in the chair, or of walking into walls, or zig-zagging up a staircase like my avatar was drunk, or sitting down in a boat only to have it instantly sink. I don’t know yet how to change clothes or find a class to take (or maybe I should say, “sit in on”!).

I felt like Alice through the looking class, but thanked my lucky stars there was no White Queen there, with her shawl flying and telling me, “Dear, you really should get out of that chair — you look quite foolish.” Of course, she claimed to be able to do six impossible things before breakfast. Maybe I can too.

Mashing it up

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I am trying to get my head around the idea of a “mashup”, a cobbling together of two technologies, or uses of technology, or even media tracks, to create something new. It seems to belong in the same brain space as “sampling”.

A recent PC World article called Google Maps’ new “My Maps” feature a mashup, and it seemed to assume that readers knew what one was. Wikipedia, of course, has some good definitions, and indicates up front that its origin is in the seeming destruction of content.

But in one of the most interesting examples of a media mashup, a point is made that the process begins with deconstruction of content, then putting it together in a way that forms a new idea. The MediaCommons Project’s In Media Res has a mashup called “The Last Lion King of Scotland“, a video that uses footage from “The Lion King” and soundtrack clips from “The Last King of Scotland” (yes, it does sound odd, and it is!).

Even more interesting is the discussion, a commenting feature embedded in the page, enabling viewers to discuss the piece, and possible student-created projects using the same techniques. I’d love comments on these ideas!

TechEd #2: Quick Multimedia

Lisa M Lane

Nanda Ganesan of Cal State LA gave a presentation on “Rapid Development of Multimedia Modules” in which he demonstrated not only good presentation technique (I took heed since I am presenting April 20 at Miramar!) but great information on how to quickly create enriching materials.

The goal is simulating the in-class experience as closely as possible. I was gratified to hear Dr. Ganesan refer to PowerPoint with narration as “sleeping aids with no side effects”, since I consider most of them to be the 21st century version of film strips. He did not reject PP entirely, however, and part of his demonstration showed how one could use a webcam to create video inside PP.

What most impressed me was his use of a “smartpad”. Using Camtasia and an electronic pen (Seiko’s $99 Inklink), Dr G created quick presentation diagrams (his sample was a computer network), explaining as he drew. This gave spontaneity to what was obviously a recorded presentation. In my classes, there are certain lectures where I use a chalkboard (really!), such as my childish (but creepy) sequence on the development of trench warfare in WWI and my diagram of the Iran-Contra scandal connections. These would be quite effective online using this technique, much more so than the still diagrams I use instead.

Throughout the demonstration (and he let the audience choose demonstration rather than presentation — very on-the-fly!), Dr G showed basic setup of big programs like Camtasia, Captivate and Snagit (I would use $69 Snapz on my Mac instead). His point was that only a few settings need be changed to get started and create something FAST. This made getting started look much less daunting for workshop attendees! Plus, the product one creates doing things quickly adds that spontaneity that helps recreate the classroom experience.

So I got a good lesson on how to present a workshop (do what the audience wants), good reasons for creating units on the fly (which I tend to do anyway), and ways to make a “how to” workshop more effective (show just a few key things and make it look easy).

TechEd #1: Wikis

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Debbie Faires of San Jose State University helped me understand some good uses for wikis. I currently use wikis only for quiz development (students add and edit questions, from which I choose for the quiz if they do enough work!). I began this last year using pbwiki (see the original wiki we made by using “history103” as the password). Now I use the wiki inside of Moodle.

Debbie noted that some of the best wikis have WYSIWYG editors, like Seedwiki which has a formatting bar instead of code. For most wikis, you must know the syntax to create links. She was fond of Google Docs, where each user is color coded for easy reference, and the wiki opens automatically in edit view. Flickr, I was reminded, can be used to have students annotate images easily, as a collaborative project. And Bubbleshare (which I learned about at a WOW2 podcast) can create slideshows to share. Debbie also reintroduced me to Zoho.com, which has chat and show applications as well as wikis.

One use is document creation collaboration among faculty. It is recommended that one not use the word “wiki”. I already violated this tenet when MiraCosta developed its Technology Plan in a wiki on my advice, using the defunct schtuff.com, now absorbed by pbwiki. I realize now that more people would have been less afraid to use the sucker if I’d called it a “collaborative document” or just “a document we can all edit”.

But the most fascinating aspect of the presentation was the usage tips. Here’s what I can do with a wiki:
* Appointment signup — everyone can see everyone else’s time slots, and sign up for meetings or office hours
* Ongoing collections — sustained collections of information that stay and are updated from semester to semester
* Podcast editing — students add time markers to class podcasts to make it easier for all students to scan to a particular topic
* Assignment sharing — students add their assignment and all appear on one page, making a large document collection
* User guides — students creating user guides (to the Course Management System, for example) to help other students
* Student book reviews — students can share individual readings with others
* Lecture links — students can create and update links that have gone down or moved
* Spreadsheet creation — the online form of each student or group giving a report on one aspect, but all are responsible for learning the whole thing (the example was each group being assigned a particular nation and reporting on working conditions)
* Resource page — student-created and edited collection of readings

One instructor assigned students to report individually on the conglomerated knowledge represented in the wiki, and assigned individual grades this way.

Debbies presentation wiki (of course!) can be found at TechEdWiki.pbwiki.com.

The extraordinary ease of Moodle

Lisa M Lane

I have just been through the wringer with my hosting service, which provides Moodle as a script but doesn’t have actual support for the software itself. I am currently teaching five classes in Moodle, and discovered something called a cron job wasn’t working properly. Cron jobs apparently are self-checks that Moodle runs which send things out (like forum posts students have subscribed to, or my announcements). I learned a few weeks ago how to set mine to run every 10 minutes, so everyone would stay updated. But a few days ago my host contacted me saying that my cron jobs were exceeding my allotted CPU usage, and this had to stop or they’d force me over to a private server. I didn’t have the knowledge to really deal with this, but the Using Moodle user posts seems to have saved me (not for the first time), and all seems OK for now.

moodleSo after several late nights grumbling (a mild term) about my hosting problems, I return to Moodle itself today to grade tests and (again not for the first time) find myself totally delighted with the ease of using it. Today’s example is that I was adding in the correct answer to essay questions before I started grading, and I was able to make them purple so I could easily see the difference between a student’s answer and my own feedback. Then, instead of grading quizzes on a student-by-student basis, I was able to use Manual Grading to see all instances of answers to the same question, and grade all of them on the same screen page. While breezing through this, I noticed that a good student had a better answer than my own. So I just opened the quiz and changed the feedback. No problem, instantly saved, viewable immediately by students, even though I was in the middle of grading and the quiz had already been deployed. Try that, Blackboard!

[Regarding the hosting problem, I’m going to start recommending that folks use a Moodle Partner host, like ClassroomRevolution.com.]

Now they’re Twittering

Lisa M Lane

Twitter? I guess it’s the newest thing in social networking. The Unethical Blogger says:
Twitter allows the masses to finally answer the question “what are you doing?”

To me, it looks like a txt form of what students do walking around San Elijo with their cell phone: “Yeah. Whatcha up to?… I just got out of class…no…walking out back to smoke a cig…yeah..I gotta class in 10 minutes…you going over to Mom’s later?…uh huh…”

Second Life

Lisa M Lane

Interesting NY Times article (sign up for free account) on colleges using Second Life to teach online. I’ve been thinking about looking into this, and the whole idea of creating such a virtual community in an educational setting. It relates to the discussion of whether it’s a good idea to co-opt teenagers’ social web world and using it for education. I’m recalling a side discussion at the Tech Plan Retreat over how students move to the next hot thing: from MySpace to Facebook to Bebo , because their space is being taken over by our generation.