Category: Web 2.0

Visioning the Future of the LMS

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Here is what I wanted to hear when I virtually attended the LMS panel at Sloan-C’s Emerging Technologies for Online Learning:

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

What I heard instead:

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

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

Let’s try this:

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

I’m sure there’s more. Add your own.

There’s no digital frontier and it isn’t closing

Lisa M Lane

I usually do not spend time on this blog analyzing other people’s analysis of web trends. There are bloggers who do that more often, and far better, than I do. But I read an article that I so wholly don’t agree with that I want to use it to clarify my own thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now I don’t just TALK a good RSS

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

Oh, sure, I know how to do it. I get what the orange symbols mean and I tell other people how to use social bookmarking for their classes. But do I do it? No. Not yet. I’m waiting for my History of England to be an honors sections, and everything to go all student-created and constructivist because I’ll only have 25 students instead of 40.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to do this crazy thing?

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

OK, so the idea is this. We have a workshop on May 7 that will meet simultaneously in a computer lab on campus and online. We have one presenter in the campus lab, and one presenter (me) online. There would be faculty just attending on campus, and some just attending online. We want the two hooked up for maximum interaction, so we can hear and (at least most of the time) see each other. The question is the best way to do this on our own, without expensive equipment.

We tend to use Elluminate for online, though this is not required. I thought I would be off-campus on Elluminate, on the webcam. On campus in the lab, Elluminate would be projected onto the main presentation screen. In order for those of us in Elluminate to see the lab, the on-campus presenter would turn his MacBook with webcam toward the room, and we’d see that in another webcam window. I guess we’d have to shift the video back and forth. I would run all websites through application sharing.

One concern is sound. Would we online be able to hear the lab, just using the built-in mic on the MacBook? The lab presenter doesn’t want to wear a mic, nor have to stand at the front to be heard — he wants to move around the lab. We don’t have a computer mic with a long cord anyway.

Another is video. Would a built in camera on the MacBook be able to show us the whole lab?

Or….is there a better way to do this?

TwHistory and the (online) discipline

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I am putting on my historian hat to analyze a website and, perhaps, a trend.

The site is called TwHistory (here’s the About page). The idea is that you recreate historical events by having participants use primary source documents to create tweets. It is certainly a Student Learning Outcome everywhere to have students use primary sources, but there is some discussion among historians about how best to do it. Many documents are written in archaic language, using slow-letter communication patterns we no longer use. That can make them hard for students to understand. One reason for TwHistory seems to be to “bring life” to documents and events.

According to their FAQ:

TwHistory is based on the idea that historical reenactments can take
place online and have positive effects for all involved. In school
settings these virtual reenactments can increase engagement while
providing opportunities for students to research personal journals and
other primary source documents.

I heard about this project at the New Media Consortium Symposium last month and posted a bit about it as part of my review (it’s at the end of the post). I had promised the presenters I would think about the concept, because I confessed it bothered me. They were not historians, and wanted input.

I asked a lot of questions at their session about how the historical sources were used — many students seemed to use actual excerpts from the documents for their posts, which of course are limited to 140 characters. Others posted about what was happening, the context. Some of these tweets used modern net-speak (you know, LOL for laugh out loud, BTW for by the way). I had a bit of trouble with the idea of Lincoln posting “87 yrs ago dudes created new nation”, but thought maybe I was being a fuddy duddy.

Some of the simulated events were deliberately done on certain dates, with certain posts written on the corresponding days of historical events (such as posting on April 9 to report Lee’s surrender 144 years earlier on that day). That was interesting, like anniversaries.

I had previously been accidentally exposed to the idea of historical tweets on Twitter itself, where for awhile I enjoyed following President Harrison. In other words, I very much like the idea of historical figures tweeting. It was very fun. So I needed to explore my gut reaction against the reenactments, and posting on sites in my discipline for Pedagogy First! gives me that opportunity.

So…I took a look today at the Gettysburg scenario. I admit to some enchantment at “seeing” the characters from history come to life in little posts, communicating with each other. Instead of reading a whole document, such as a letter or diary entry, the short format forces a communicating style that is much more direct than it actually was in the 19th century. Nevertheless, there was much that sounded 19th century, that clearly came directly from documents. It was delightful to read what was happening!

What’s created here is clearly story-telling. History is partly story-telling, but it is also making meaning from past events as recorded in documents. It seems to me that the story itself, told this way, could have an entirely different meaning than the actual events support. Abraham Lincoln could have written a letter to a general on a particular day, but it might not have arrived for weeks, so having Lincoln and the general communicate via Twitter makes a false impression, even if the messages are spaced out by the same number of weeks. The fact that communication was not this direct had an extraordinary impact on events. People could not read each other’s diaries and letters to other people.

Sort-of 13th century armor,
but not really.
(http://www.sca.org/officers/media/images.html

This brings up, for me, interesting questions about the use of new internet communications for the teaching of history. For student engagement, I can easily see how a TwHistory reenactment project could be enlightening, but it seems on the same level as something like the Society for Creative Anachronism, the members of whom frequent Renaissance Faires. Many of them love history, and SCA says they are an “Organisation dedicated to researching and recreating pre-17th century European history.” They are history enthusiasts rather than scholars, and I often see their membership wearing clothes from the 16th or 18th century or, even more often, clothing loosely based on designs from these centuries but no more authentic than a stage costume, complete with contemporary interpretations. As with costume designers for theatre, many are very well read in the period, and I have nothing against SCA or Civil War reenactors or anyone making history come alive — on the contrary. One of my favorite places in the world is the Modern History Gallery at the Royal BC Museum, where I can wander a 19th century street. I’m also quite partial to New Orleans Square at Disneyland.

Those are places to experience what certain elements of the past might have been like, rather than places to do history as a student. TwHistory seems to be the SCA version of history, but developed deliberately as a scholarly project inside schools.

There are also parallels to the History Channel, a popular television channel that features documentaries, most of which focus on the sensationalist aspects of historical events. This make history interesting, it is said, as if it isn’t otherwise. The result is a lack of depth and perspective, the kind of thing that is gained by careful, deep reading of multiple sources, both primary and secondary. Historians develop theses about the past, and prove them with evidence. While perhaps not scientific in the same sense as a laboratory science, there is a methodology that is inherent in the discipline.

TwHistory teaches students one aspect of the method, the use of primary sources within a historical context. But recreation/reenactment is not really historical analysis — it is great for history buffs, but not so much for students studying history as a discipline. I’m not sure where the lines are exactly, between engagement in the events of history and actual inquiry, but I don’t think TwHistory crosses fully into the discipline the way it should with young historians. I remain deeply uncomfortable with it.

[Please forgive the double-post — I wrote this for Pedagogy First! but decided it should also go on my online teaching blog.]

FERPA Schmerpa, the LMS and open ed

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I’ve been involved in a discussion with an online teaching colleague about FERPA and its implications. Periodically, FERPA issues emerge, usually at the administrative level. I’ve seen this at a number of institutions of higher ed. Faced with a law that seems to protect student privacy (even when it allows, in my opinion, violations such as the release of ones address in a directory), colleges tend to take a draconian approach to prevent lawsuits (and loss of federal funding, though this has apparently never happened). Everything educationally open one might want to do could be a potential FERPA violation, including blogging, content creation, bookmark sharing, and commenting on the open web. My colleague’s concern in particular was whether it was OK to post evaluative instructor comments on a student’s open blog.

Image cc by xiaming at Flickr

In the course of our discussion we looked at a discussion about FERPA and Web 2.0, plus some campus policies and checklists (like this one from Oregon and this one from Winona and this from University of North Florida) as well as the law itself. Since I’ve been teaching for 20 years, I’ve heard several times that I must not post grades where students are identifiable on the list, and I know that some colleges say secret names are OK but others say not. Colleges differ in how they interpret FERPA. Most of the interpretations date from the pre-internet era, though some like the Virginia Commonwealth University have an updated version specific to online — it’s not very different, though.

I have not worried too much about FERPA since I discovered the 2002 Supreme Court decision in Owasso Independent School Dist. No. I011 v. Falvo, where the Oyez site notes:

In a unanimous opinion delivered by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the Court held that Peer grading does not violate FERPA. The Court reasoned that peer-graded items did not constitute education records protected by FERPA until a teacher collected the grades on the students’ papers or other items and recorded the grades in the teacher’s grade book. In reaching its conclusion, the Court noted that peer-graded items were not “maintained” within in the meaning of FERPA, as the student graders only handled the items for a few moments. Moreover, the Court stated that each student grader, by grading assignments, did not constitute a person acting for an educational institution within FERPA.

As far as I’m concerned, this covers most of the things I do that might be perceived by someone as problematic.

In all my online classes, every week, students post evidence in a forum, then create a thesis and post it. I do “evaluate” these theses in a sense, though I do not “grade” them, by commenting on the theses of several students on the forum, noting which are factual and which interpretive and why. I occasionally ask students to take on a colleague’s thesis and say how it could be improved.

Is this peer grading? It could be, except that the comments are not “grades” — they don’t “stick” nor are they recorded individually in the gradebook. But in student self-evaluations (the private part with just the student and me), students comment on their own achievements and I put a grade on the combined effort of eight weeks of forum work.

I frankly don’t see a whole lot of difference between this and what I do in an my on-site class when groups do presentations and I comment aloud on how they did, strengths and weaknesses, to expand the discussion. It’s instant feedback, but the purpose is to keep all of us on the same subject at the same time. If I gave them feedback and asked questions later and privately, only that particular group would learn, and by then the class will have moved on. Sometimes students peer grade the presentations, and I post every group’s combined “grade” and comments, although these do not translate to anything formal since I don’t grade groups at all except as part of a student’s participation grade.

To me, posting/presenting and commenting is open work and open education — for my online classes, this process is behind a wall right  now only because I’m in a Learning Management System (Moodle), but it shouldn’t be. If I instead used a Ning, I could set it to be closed, “just for students”, but I’d like everyone to see the work. This is where I’m heading with online teaching — open courses. Learning should be open — if it is, people will be less afraid to try out their ideas, absorb and respond to criticism. They will also be part of a larger community. That’s how the web works, and these are important skills for my students’ careers. But much of this approach could be seen under the formal rules as FERPA violations, so do I dare open things up?

Then it occurred to me: perhaps using outside websites gets around some FERPA foolishness.

Image cc by h.koppdelaney at Flickr

If I am using a college-supported LMS, clearly it could be argued that the entire course is a record maintained by the institution, especially if we are archiving whole classes. In fact, that seems to make an online class more FERPA-protected than an on-site class, since for an on-site class the instructors alone maintain all records except the final grade, in piles of gradebooks and old assignments in their office. FERPA has been around a long time, yet no one has ever asked me about the records I maintain for on-site classes. But an online class is stored, the whole thing, often by the institution.

So here’s the cool thing. If we are having students use Blogger and are commenting on their posts, for example, how can it be claimed that it is “maintained” by the institution? I can see the privacy violations, of course, that many try to solve by allowing students to use aliases, but I can’t help but wonder whether using outside technologies don’t actually protect us from FERPA violations!

In my totally non-legally trained fly-by-night interpretation of FERPA, the only thing that needs to be behind a wall is the gradebook. Engrade (or a pay-to-play online gradebook) can do that, so no problem. Obviously this is not the first time I’ve posted on the issue of why bother with an LMS (must be something about April!). But in seeing those interactive websites we love as not only a place to learn but a place where the very lack of institutional control might be a benefit to us and our institutions, I think I’m making strides here.

What I did at school today: CoolIris

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

10:00 My pedagogical goal today was to get away from the political focus I’ve been using (and which a student has called me on — this is a Humanities GE class, after all) and get into some culture.

I wanted to use my favorite romantic paintings to collaboratively explore some common themes in art of the 19th century: man vs. nature, the unconscious mind, emotions of liberty, effects of industrialization, etc. in a historical context.

Basically, I wanted a slideshow, but one where I could see all the images as a collection, rather than using a list of links or a linear PowerPoint-type presentation. Bounce around a bit, yes, but Prezi seemed too heavy for such a task.

So instead I tried CoolIris. I have played with it a bit, but had problems and never really understood how I’d use it. But when I started with what I wanted to do, it got easier. (Lesson: start with what you want to do, not the technology!) I wanted high quality images, not lossy, fuzzy, grainy web jpgs. So instead of using my web versions of these images, I got them fresh off an art CD I own. Big files. My plan was to put them on a flash drive, bring them to the classroom, install CoolIris real quick on the Mac Mini, and show stuff. I had an hour.

10:05 To test in my office, I installed CoolIris, which took less than a minute. I told it to open the folder where I’d put the images. Everything displayed in alphabetical order. I wanted the wall to display in the order in which I planned to show the images initially, in order of my themes. So I went back into the folder and put a number at the front of each image file name (i.e. “15ArabHorseman”). Tried again. It took all the 10s and put them first. Went back and did the single digit names again (i.e. “03RodinVictorHugo”).

10:35 Uh oh, I’d left my flash drive at home. Luckily, I had my mp3 recorder in my purse, so I used it as a flash drive and put the folder on it.

11:00 Got to class right on time but…oh no! I’d forgotten the Mac Mini was being reimaged and they’d put a Dell PC in its place. I always tell people, “I don’t do Windows”, but what choice did I have? I opened Firefox, went to CoolIris.com, installed it easily. I plugged my mp3 drive into a USB port at the back (had to search around — they’re on the side on a Mac). CoolIris saw it immediately as a local drive and brought up my folder. Clicked the folder, clicked the double arrow symbol to make it full screen, and there it was. Way easy.

As an aside (or maybe not) the handout was a sheet of tables with boxes. On the left side was the artist and title of each work, a set of three or four for each theme. On the right side, the box was empty. I encouraged them to draw rather than write in the box for each artwork, to sketch the image instead of taking notes. They really liked this, and saw much more in the image because they were sketching it, rather than just talking about the art. I’ll do that again too…

Really Recording a Lecture

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

tools

Yesterday I had two students write in saying they would miss class for the flu, and one for an emergency root canal. It seemed a good opportunity to see if I could “record” class for them, especially since I’m now using Prezi.

I have recorded audio before, on my little Phillips mp3 player. I have even sychronized it with my PowerPoints, and posted it on Slideshare for almost a whole class last year.

But I never liked PowerPoint, and I’ve begun experimenting with Prezi. So I tried ScreenToaster, which doesn’t require a download to my classroom computer. I started up ScreenToaster, created a box that covered my Prezi, and started recording. Then I started audio recording on my mp3 player. I lectured for about an hour. Having never used ScreenToaster before, I saved as .mov before I left the room, but didn’t save at the site itself because I assumed ScreenToaster saved it (it doesn’t). That was OK — I had a .mov for the video on my flash drive (which had the Prezi on it already), and a .mp3 for audio on my Phillips.

I put them together in Quicktime Pro by opening the audio, opening the video, lining it up as best I could and pasting. Then I created a movie of the same size with a graphic and some music, and pasted it on. This was not elegant, but better than using iMovie, which would have messed up the stills.

The resulting .mov was big, so I tried to upload it to Vimeo, but the multiple file types included meant Vimeo wouldn’t take it. After exporting several times (very frustrating with such a big file), I had an “aha!” moment and just converted it using VisualHub to an mp4 .mov . This uploaded into Vimeo.

Here’s my lecture.

Then I emailed the students. One has thanked me already!

Delicious or Diigo: Efficiency or Networking?

Lisa M Lane 10 Comments

diigoordelicious

I am experimenting with using both Diigo and Delicious, trying to see which suits me best. I began with Delicious but everyone kept telling me Diigo is better because you can annotate. Both have some social network functions, but Diigo is supposedly more friendly to them.

I have been trying to save the bookmarks into Diigo, and have set Diigo so it posts automatically to Delicious too. This feature works very well.

So far, though, Delicious has better usability.

  • In Diigo, if I open the Bookmark function on Diigolet, I can click back on the page to select something to paste in the description — I have to do that first.
  • In Diigo, it makes it hard to select things on the web page; it assumes I want to highlight instead of, say, copy, some text.
  • Diigo doesn’t seem to group tags. I’m a tag-challenged tag amnesiac. I need to group them.
  • Diigo’s search isn’t intuitive. I tried “group tags” and what it brought up was useless.
  • In Diigo, help is at the bottom, and much of it is video and screencasts, not text. It’s help page search finds jpgs first, for some reason. I cannot find info on folders — tools has different things than I expect.

Except for one thing: the Diigolet in my toolbar makes me sign in, like Delicious, but when I do it automatically brings up my saved username and password — Delicious makes me type in my username first.

And the Diigo feature of in-line highlighting and annotations can be a big deal, especially for pages I save in the tag category I call “articles” — full pieces I’m saving for research.

What I may do is use Diigo for articles, and Delicious for everything else.

The problem is that Diigo’s social aspects means people are “following” my bookmarks, and I belong to a couple of groups there, like CCK09. That has made me think about the social networking aspect a little more.

I find a group that’s trapped within a site to be inefficient — I don’t want another site to check, nor more emails. The approach of tagging everything with an assigned tag (“CCK09”, or “ec&itools” or “ec&ireadings” for Alec Couros’ class) seems more efficient. Items tagged by anyone can then be found in several ways, including the new visual tag aggregator Spezify.

But that leaves the big community question: where is it best for people sharing bookmarks to “meet”?

This is Progress?

Lisa M Lane 14 Comments

Twitter opened a world to me. All the great educational technologists and teachers, posting links and talking to each other and to me. Often every day. It was riveting to follow the flow of conversation, check out the links. I’d post a question about an application, or Moodle, or which camera I should buy, and I’d get advice from several people whose opinion I trusted, within a few hours. Unlike many who use Twitter, I wasn’t posting what I had for breakfast and neither were they. This was cool professional development.

But then I noticed, as the number of my “followers”, and those I “followed” increased, everything spread out. I follow 121 people. 394 follow me. But some of the people I follow, they follow thousands (like *Alec Couros, at a whopping 2,146). New apps (like <*Tweetdeck) were designed to help us sort the tweets, because they all scroll by so fast when following so many people. We could sort into columns by who we really, really wanted to read. Or use hashtags to follow topics we really, really wanted to follow.

I notice now, over the past few months, that my tweets for help or advice are only answered by one or two people, usually none. If I don’t use an “@” symbol to talk to someone specific, I rarely get a response. One day I tweeted:

I think there are now so many people on Twitter that no one can keep up — I’m getting great ideas, but few answers to questions now

I received (one) response in agreement. People have overloaded themselves with followers, and in an attempt to preserve sanity actually only communicate with a few.

I am noticing a similar pattern with many of the social networking tools used by educators. Nings and Facebook groups are established, then abandoned. Our RSS readers fill up until we give up and actually read very little (what, our readers don’t read for us?). Sometimes I scan for hours and find fascinating tidbits I don’t know what to do with. I bookmark them, socially of course, on Delicious, but rarely go back to them unless I remember I did that.

Although there seem to be new technologies every day, the basic formats are calcifying. Wikis are a great idea, because people can collaborate. But in practice, people don’t really want to work inside other people’s wikis (come on over and paint a wall at my house, will you?). Blogs, because of their post/comment format, are most conducive to presentation, then commentary, not true conversations. There are also problems with the keys. We’re tired of logging in differently everywhere (yeah, that OpenID thing was a fine idea, but didn’t work), so we don’t bother to show up at all. The cocktail party goes on without us. We’d look it up later except that, in a desire to maintain individuality, no one is tagging stuff the same way.

Aggregation, which was supposed to make it possible for us to follow only the people and trends that were important to us, has atrophied. RSS is stuck in a phase where it is still overly visible and geeky to be useful to most people. It’s like a British hot water heater, requiring continual tinkering. “Friendly” aggregators like MyYahoo never advanced beyond their “customizable home page” idea. I can put everything on Pageflakes, but I have to log into everything individually anyway, so why bother? I could join a Ning, but each Ning also requires its own log-in.

On the other hand, Google tries so hard at single log-in it’s creepy, as they persistently invite me to sign in with my Google ID to sites that used to be independent. But Facebook is even darker, with its targeted individualized collection of user information. All this is so they can market to me, personally. The Google method is algorithms, based on use (unfortunately for them, my use varies depending on what I’m researching at that minute, not what I looked for last time). The Amazon/Facebook way is to target me via my purchases (if I buy a flea comb to clean my fingernails, I will receive ads for cat food). The Firefox way is to offer oodles of “plug ins” (all of which should have been included and invisible by now), pastry tips on the firehose of information.

The persistent lack of profitability from all these methods causes its own problem. Some of the trendiest tech conferences won’t UStream their sessions, because they need people to come and pay at the conference. Web apps let you create great multimedia…things…but you can’t download them in a common format. Web app companies don’t want you to download the products you create, because then you won’t need to come back into the program, where they want you to pay, or see advertising. Often such “free” apps are stuck in permanent beta (I still can’t move the text box in Zoho Show without erasing it).

Desktop technology isn’t any better, even as prices rise. Apple’s software continues to devolve rather than improve (sure, you can do chapter markers in iMovie, but they don’t transfer to iDVD) and the best use of their glossy monitor is to see people sneaking up behind you. It’s hard to find an inexpensive netbook that doesn’t have Windows Hasta-La-Vista pre-installed, and MS Office for Mac is simply awful. But we pay for new machines because we need the speed, and we need the speed to use all those web applications to create the cool stuff we can’t download.

I see no great vision out there. After a hot couple of years of innovation, things have gone glacial. And I can’t even figure out which camera to buy. Maybe it’s time to post about that Mesa Sunrise cereal I had this morning.

ED-MEDIA 2009

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Last week I attended the ED-MEDIA conference in Honolulu, the highly productive conference sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). I had attended in 2007 in Vancouver and knew it would be great. I took notes on all the sessions and the many things I’ve learned, so much that it would make this post WAY too long! So you can read my full report if you wish — I will be later developing some of the ideas into individual posts.

It was most exciting to meet some of the people I only know from online, including George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Kristina Hoeppner, and Alan Levine. Plus I gained great respect for the work and delightful conversation of Nancy White and Tony Hirst. The beautiful setting was an enhancement rather than a distraction, and our mile-plus walk to dinner one night while talking teaching, technology, and more was a highlight of my time there.

pictochatMy first technology-related experience, however, was on the plane getting here from San Diego. The flight was 5 1/2 hours, and during that time total strangers sat next to each other without ever introducing themselves, sharing adjacent space. Gradually I noticed some children giggling nearby. I looked over and they were, I thought, playing Nintendo. But when I peeked, I saw that they were writing on the screen, and I soon realized that many children on the plane had Nintendos and were using its wi-fi pictochat feature to write to each other. After an hour or so, children were exchanging information about their seat locations, and were getting up and saying hi. At one point there were kids standing in the aisle and the flight attendant had to ask them to sit down so she could serve food. By the time they had to shut off their devices for landing, they knew where everyone was staying in Hawaii and had arranged playdates if their hotels were near each other, forcing the parents to actually meet each other. The kids used technology to create society on the plane, where adults only endured the enforced company of others.

Flickr photos: a few of mine (most not by me) are tagged as “edmedia”. See also Twitter stream with #edmedia hashtag.

Pedagogy and Middle Ground

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments
Adapted from Flickr cc image by yewenyi

Having begun reading Alfie Kohn’s The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and Tougher Standards (1999), with its trashing of the “Old School” pedagogies, I posted a tweet this morning:

not happy with the lack of middle ground between the PLE/open “individualized exploration” and the LMS/data-driven “rote content” arguments

Then, following a tweet from Dave Cormier this morning, I discovered George Siemens‘ slides from the Africa presentation he’s giving today, apparently. Here’s Slide 15:

I noticed that if you took out the text in the middle, the process is very much the same as what I’d call Good Traditional Learning. Certainly as a historian, this is what I do. In fact, there is even more interplay between aspects of the prospect, if you’ll forgive my doodling:

As a historian, I naturally assume that ideas are not really new, but just a revision due to circumstances. And certainly, in my various discussions of connectivist theory, I hashed this out last fall.

During the class and again today, I’ve observed the polarization of educational ideas. On the one hand, you have the “Old School” hardliners, the “back to basics” folks, the ones pushing accountability, Student Learning Outcomes, data-driven models, etc. Industrialized education. Enlightenment social science gone mad.

On the other are the highly innovative ed-techies who say schools are failing because we are failing students, unempowering them to learn. Kohn’s book, constructivist and connectivist learning theory, promoters of blogs and wikis and Personal Learning Environments. Edupunks (I’m proud to be one!), learner-centered, wired. Those who claim today’s students are different (you can put the technology horse before or after this cart), so they need different methods to learn. Some even claim to be going back to a pre-industrial model, as in this article claiming that the grading system was created as a lazy and inappropriate way to assess learning. Many in this crowd don’t like Marc Prensky, with his idea of digital natives and digital immigrants, but others start with his ideas. For those not familiar with this view, Michael Wesch‘s classic video should help:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&w=425&h=344]

The Middle Ground seems to be somewhat different, and I intend to explore these ideas further. I see a number of elements working against the polarization of educational viewpoints:

  • Student skills
    Students today are technologically savvy only for social interaction, not academic work (see analysis of the ETS ICT report from 2007, among others)
  • Student use
    Students are not particularly avid users of Web 2.0 technologies (Kennedy et al, 2007)
  • Workplace conditions
    The conditions of the educational workplace require most of us to teach industrial-sized classes, making individualized approaches impossible unless they are almost completely student-led. (I have often been astonished by the failure of the “new” crowd to acknowledge this simple problem and deal with it on anything other than an “overthrow the system!” kind of way.)
  • Retraining
    Creating constructivist or connectivist learning environments involves re-training instructors in areas far beyond their disciplines, and such re-training is not supported by compensation in any form.
  • Student expectations
    In keeping with the cultural movement toward self-esteem boosting, open access education and reality-show social interactions, students now expect to be entertained and “engaged” in their classes. They do not particularly value self-motivation, organization, or the abundance of content available to them.
  • Anti-intellectualism
    Many also don’t value the development of knowledge, which requires reflection. The tendency toward multi-tasking and mashups of content encourages superficiality of intellectual process in a world already too accepting of snap judgements and “fly over” assessments of data.

Yes, there are certainly problems. Some students are disengaged, and today’s iPod is yesterday’s comic book or television. Some students who would succeed better in vocational education are now put through General Education, and consider a passing grade (not just equal access) to be a civil right. Many wish to be entertained, are restricted by instructors in their approach to material, and want to break away.

Some Middle Ground approaches might include:

  • Subversive innovation
    Tech-savvy, constructivist and/or connectivist instructional methods can be implemented (at least at the college level) inside the restrictive data-driven environment. This has been my solution for many years.
  • Acknowledging skills deficiencies
    It is foolish to assume that students know all the web tools, or how to use any technology (textbook, video, internet) for learning. Like the skills for a discipline, these must too be taught if we’re going to use the tools. (I don’t mean the technical skill of how to make PowerPoint slides, but rather the methods for creating new content through deep understanding of the old content.)
  • Professional development focused on pedagogy
    This would ensure that the instructor’s strengths are the focus of any method, rather than the latest trendy technology.
  • Supplemented assessment
    There are many types of success, and some, as I mentioned in my last post, have nothing to do with completing the class or earning a passing grade. To these mandatory manifestations of student success should be added “assessment” of potential and contribution.
  • Independent/alternative study
    Any independent options available to instructors could be used, including independent study, alternative assignments, and credit for outside work.
  • Thinking creatively.
baby in bathwater
No need to throw out the baby
or the bathwater
Flickr cc image from Pfau

None of these is new. All are techniques used for many years to provide instructors with approaches to respond to changing populations of students. There is no need to push the Hegelian dialectic to envision a synthesis of traditionalism with Edupunk, since a similar balance has been struck by good instructors for years. I’m sure you can think of at least one elementary or high school teacher you had who did these things. I personally recall my junior high English teacher, who let a gang of us write, rehearse and produce a play based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” instead of sit in class. We did all the standardized testing, fulfilled the curriculum, she just thought a little sideways. As a result, I always saw school as I environment I could change to fit my goals. Empowerment did not require a complete rejection of tradition, just a middle ground between extremes.

Faculty and Web 2.0

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

Last year, our technicians at Academic Information Services were concerned that if we encouraged faculty to use web 2.0 applications in their teaching, they would expect AIS to provide support. Obviously, the college’s staff can’t be tech support for the whole internet! So I drafted a document that ultimately got approved by the Technology and Pedagogy Committee, then Senate Council, which kind of makes it policy.

Here are the Guidelines for Non-College Supported Technologies in its final form, and here is the Voicethread slideshow I prepared to help faculty work through it:

http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=52485

The tricky part was to try to encourage instructors to use the wonderful variety of tools available on the web, but let them know that the traditional support systems do not apply. While it was a bit of a tightrope, I was glad to be able to do it in such a way that faculty felt encouraged to experiment, rather than discouraged.

[Thanks to Mike Bogle for getting me out of my posting funk (I have written several posts lately, but they’re all too whiney) and reminding me there are some cool things happening out there as faculty get onto the web.]

Synchronicity vs Tracking

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

During this break, I was looking at some of the various web spaces of a new online colleague of mine, Ed Webb, a Poli Sci prof in Pennsylvania. He’s got classes working in various spaces such as Wetpaint, and he’s doing cool things like having them use Meebo to chat while they watch a movie. And it made me think about synchronicity.

Most of what I do with my online students is asynchronous. This is because I acknowledge that many of them take an online class because they cannot attend a class on campus at a particular time (most of our online students live inside our district). Several years ago I tried to set up online office hours, but it was a problem because I have four online classes. Each has its own course inside the CMS (before it was Blackboard, now it is Moodle). There is no convenient way to open a chat with all classes at once, other than IM. And I’ve noticed that fewer and fewer students use IM these day (although I have spent some time in the last few weeks adding GoogleTalk chatback badges to my web pages instead of just Yahoo and AIM status indicators). Moodle does let you open a meta-course and enroll everyone, then link their course to that meta-course but man, what a pain.

To get a place where a group could meet synchronously, I could go to the web and open a room somewhere, like Yahoo or ooVoo, and link to it from the class, but this would require students to get an account an log in, and I’d need them to log in so I could see who was there. Or I could use Elluminate inside Moodle, and trust them to be OK with the extra step and Javascript download, but even there they must enter a name. They could just type in any old name to join the discussion. I picture myself leading a synchronous discussion with a couple of dozen students, recording it and having to jot down names, the quality of what they contribute and how long they stay. Sounds like a pre-web nightmare.

How could I track participation? Don’t I need something automated with up to 200 students?

In thinking on this, it occurred to me: tracking is, by itself, the biggest problem with Web 2.0 for activities that count for the grade. The biggest reason we all use a CMS in the first place (especially now that there are other wonderful options) is just that: tracking, of grades, participation, performance, portfolios. The asynchronous environment, inside a closed system, is simply the easiest way to track student activity.

As I plan for Spring, I consider things like this….

Whatcha using?

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

For the first time, I was called (by one of my favorite Twitter buds Eduardo Peirano) an edupunk. In keeping with that, here’s a list of free web technologies and accounts I’ve cobbled together into my own peculiar learning and organizational environment:

  • Zoho – Writer for making notes and to-do lists for myself that I can access from anywhere, Show for quick slideshows on the fly

  • Tumblr – for storing quick things I find just for myself, without organizational format
  • Flickr – for creating the occasional annotated image for teaching, storing other people’s images I may want to use later
  • Del.icio.us – for storing bookmarks easily with the Firefox plug-in; it also helps me learn how to tag effectively for later retrieval
  • WordPress – for this blog, and now the professional development blog too – it’s so wonderfully stable (till you upgrade, of course)
  • Gmail – to combine my various email accounts, and I’m enjoying the chat feature (though I really wish I could download my mail and save it — I’m using Thunderbird too, just to archive!)
  • Moodle – my course management system of choice (obviously!)
  • Feedraider – for reading my RSS feeds from other people’s blogs etc, though I’m hating how difficult it is to move things around and I’m shopping for something better
  • Nucleus – for my history blog
  • Twitter – for my daily contact with wonderful IT folks

    And which have proven disappointing:

    • Facebook – yeah, I know I said it before, but honestly I’m not seeing its use, and I do resent that you can never, ever leave (only deactivate temporarily)
    • FriendFeed – without access to Feedraider and the other programs I used, aggregating what was left wasn’t worth it

Workflow for Preview of Cached Pages

Lisa M Lane

Problem: I have many links to web pages throughout my history lectures, and many change addresses or disappear over time. Logically, I have begun caching pages using Furl. Furl will save a cached (saved) version of a page, and then I can link to that. As I was looking at the lecture pages to find the downed links, it occurred to me that would be easier with a preview pop-up window, like Snap. That would also make it easier for students to see where the link goes.

So I got a Snap account, and they kindly agreed upon request to get rid of the ad links. At first, I had trouble. The Snap window clicked through to the right page, but the Snap preview window showed only the Furl log-in page, which is useless. Then after a few tries, the right page would come up. At first I thought it was Snap screwing up. So I tried Snap alternatives Thumbshots and iwebtool’s Thumbnails, but no joy. So I wrote to the Furl folks, but getting no response and taking this recommendation, I tried Diigo instead.

I have not previously been impressed with Diigo. In fact, I originally planned for it to appear on my list of disappointments in my next post. But it created archived pages faster and more conveniently than Furl, with its own pop-up window for tagging.

In the meantime, Katie at Snap.com responded to my plea. Turns out I was rushing the system (as usual). She told me that it wasn’t that I had to click so many times for the right page to show, but that the first user seeing it the first time (me) causes the page image to capture properly. It should display any cached page correctly from then on, so all I need to do is check my links when I’m done. A bit clumsy, but doable.

So here’s the workflow. First, I add the tiny javascript from Snap to the body of each lecture webpage. That enables all the Snap windows to pop up on any external link. I find the page it links to (easier if it’s there, otherwise I have to search or find a new one). Then I bookmark that page in my Diigo toolbar, tagging it with the course and lecture number. Then I use the Diigo toolbar menu -> This URL -> Cached version. That brings up the cached version of the page, which starts with a Diigo address. I copy the URL into my weblecture page.

Now I can see all the downed links using Snap, students can see a preview and then go to a cached page that never disappears. I like it!

Referencing Rhizomes

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

In a sense, this is the first post I’ve been “asked” to write, since Dave Cormier invited all those attending his online session today to blog about the ideas.

In his recent article in Innovate Journal (also at his blog), Cormier described his rhizome metaphor. According to the abstract:

In place of the expert-centered pedagogical planning and publishing cycle, Cormier suggests a rhizomatic model of learning. In the rhizomatic model, knowledge is negotiated, and the learning experience is a social as well as a personal knowledge creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.

During the backchannel conversation, I realized I am becoming somewhat critical of collaboration as a source of knowledge, of constructivism, of the foundations of this rhizomatic concept. I do believe in the democratization and construction of knowledge. I do not believe that “experts” know all the answers. I know that the role of instructor can shift from an expert who relays her/his knowledge to a guide or (as we discussed in the session) a mapmaker. We draw the maps that can lead students through our subject. I have no problem with educators as facilitators rather than lecturers, though I strongly believe that pedagogical planning is what faculty should be doing.

Cormier is clearly not fond of the current system of knowledge dissemination; his words imply it is static and petrified. The rhizomatic alternative is more dynamic. But surely the new model already exists at the advanced level of our disciplines? “Fluid” canons aren’t canons at all, unless it’s in their application, and “knowledge” moves whenever a paradigm shifts. We all know that knowledge is not the core facts, but the absorption of concepts for analysis. History is hardly a discipline on the “bleeding edge”, yet doing history is conceptual and fluid — only the sources may be considered canonical. I do not see in my own field the petrification implied by the traditional model, although sometimes the changes move more slowly than I would like.

I get a little worried about weeds, those invasive rhizomes that can threaten native growth. The issue seems to be social constructivism. The question I raised, and which I still don’t really have an answer to, is whether knowledge must be social. To an extent, as was pointed out by a colleague, all knowledge obtained by the individual is, in a sense, social. Even if I’m reading a book written 250 years ago, I am “communicating” with the author, or s/he is communicating to me. As I read, I apply ideas from others that I have adapted to my own purposes over the years. Thus my knowledge could be seen as socially constructed.

At the same time, my own learning style is not social. I score high in “interpersonal/self” on Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. I prefer to read and be left alone to analyze scholarly material, not discuss it with others. I despised group work as a student and don’t much enjoy committees.

But none of this is true when it comes to the web. I am thrilled at all I learn from Twitter and finding out what others are thinking and learning online, and I enjoy contributing (obviously — this is my blog!). But the enjoyment and usefulness of my social network is limited to online issues, instructional technology, geeky teaching stuff. Could it be that the field of instructional technology is in itself the “bleeding edge”, and thus the most suited to the social construction of knowledge? Given my own predilections when I am learning about, say, history, I much prefer to be on my own with the hard-earned context inside my head.

If mostly geeky teachers like me, ed tech professionals, and webheads are lauding social constructivism, then is the rhizomatic idea self-referential? Does it grow best in the environment which gave it life (web-based IT) and struggle for a toehold beyond that area? I have witnessed many a chat session where teachers and ed tech folks bemoan the fact that this collaborative internet learning stuff just isn’t catching on as much as we would hope. Most Twitterers and Ningers are educators and techy trendsetters. Our students respond when activities are engaging, but we aren’t even sure that engagement means learning.

It is tempting to visualize an anti-social networking movement. (And no, I do not mean the sites snubbing people.) Here we would admit we’re not very social, there would be no emoticons, and we’d read what others have written without feeling an obligation to respond. We would not reject Wikipedia like the Middlebury folks, but we wouldn’t wax rhapsodic about socially constructed knowledge either. We could tell who the experts are in our fields by how well they communicate and how well vetted their contributions are. Current traditions of peer-reviewed and scientific-objective oriented work would continue, albeit available in a handy web-based format. We could contact each other personally or join social networks as clubs to hang out, echo chambers for our egos, and places to find like-minded individuals with whom to communicate. But we don’t have to construct knowledge together. Perhaps we’d use a bulb analogy instead, where we come back every year after resting in the winter, having stored our own individual energy inside. Our smaller prodigy bulbs will spring up beside us. A more domesticated form of nature, rather than rhizomatic wildness. Surely our ability to weed out junk would be appreciated in the long run?

Seeking Workflows

Lisa M Lane

At a workshop given early this semester, I found myself teaching an instructor a workflow. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to do something in Blackboard, but that she needed a quick click-click-click task pattern to do something efficiently.

The other day I was listening to the podcast of Stephen Downes’ presentation on Personal Learning for Alec Couros’ EC&I 831 class at the University of Regina. As Downes took us through his Personal Learning Environment, he showed how he uses tools like Plex, MyGlu, RSS Writr, and Edu_RSS to sort through information (I think these tools are his own inventions). Although it was certainly not the point of the presentation, I found myself focusing on his workflow.

Then I stumbled on CogDogBlog’s post and replies about Web 2.0 gems, which led me through one of Alan’s own responses to FlickrCC (where I can find creative commons license images more quickly), which offered editing for the images in Piknik, an online image editor. I imagined a workflow when I need an image:

Find image in FlickrCC -> edit in Picknik -> download to desktop -> upload to website

Of course, when I tried it, I found I couldn’t put the attribution link in easily at all. It kept making it too big for the image. I usually do this kind of thing in html, or by editing the image in GraphicConverter. So the workflow became:

Find image in FlickrCC -> Save Image As to image folder -> open Graphic Converter -> create margin -> copy and paste attribution text and save -> open Dreamweaver -> upload image

Not fun. I know some of my current workflows are more cumbersome than they need to be. I open Dreamweaver every time I want to upload a file. But I keep stumbling on the same issues with web apps. It looks like the workflow will be great, but then it doesn’t work in a key area.

I bookmark to Del.icio.us. This should be easy, because Firefox has a toolbar button. Ideally, I go to a page, I want to bookmark it, and a window pops up to tag it:

Find page -> click toolbar button -> tag

Works fine from my office computer. From my home computer, I have to log in to Del.icio.us every time I start a new session. This is a separate pop-up window, and I lose track of what I wanted to bookmark in the first place.

Today I am seeking an online presentation tool, a PowerPoint beater. I tried Zoho Show (see previous post). OpenOffice’s presenter was too slow on my iBook. I downloaded a demo version of PulpMotion and tried Empressr, but they only seemed to accept local files, audio and video I either record on the spot or already possess, nothing from the web like embedded YouTube. I tried Preezo, but it only inserts an image (though it does let you use a URL for that) or text, no multimedia. So now I’ll keep going through other people’s tool lists. It’s not that I couldn’t go further and possibly make these other programs do what I want, but why should I have to?

So I’m thinking I’m not looking for good web apps any more. I’m looking for good workflows.

Zoho Show

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I created my first Zoho Show for illustrating lecture last night, and ran it in class today.

http://show.zoho.com/embed?USER=llane&DOC=Politics%20and%20Culture%20After%20the%20Great%20War&IFRAME=yes

There were a few problems with creation.

  • The text boxes were unwieldy. They did not appear at the spot I clicked, and got confused with other image boxes on the page, so that when I tried to select a text box, it chose the nearby image box.
  • Text entry was very clunky.
  • The embedded YouTube videos, even when I made them smaller, did not play in sync on either my desktop or the class computer, and the links didn’t work in class. The start-up arrow went way to the side in class too.
  • I couldn’t export; ended up with a screen of code. (That’s OK, since the publish and embed feature obviously works well!)
  • As the slideshow grew, response time got slower and slower, to the point where I’d forgetten what I was doing waiting for something to load, or got to far ahead of the software and it lost my keystrokes.

Of course, it is also missing audio narration, so it’s not ready for an online class yet unless I use another program to record.

Good aspects were that it was easy to manipulate images, slides could be rearranged, and its default image size was manageable. It also has good publish and embed features for the finished product. I’d like to see Zoho develop audio narration recording for each slide, and fix the text issues.

Are We There Yet?

Lisa M Lane

In the interest of keeping pedagogy first, I start with the problem.

My online classes consist of:

  • reading and viewing assignments from textbook and web
  • text and illustrated online lecture (with audio and some video clips)
  • historical documents (linked to lecture and available to print)
  • weekly discussion topics with mid-week guidance
  • multiple-choice and essay assessments every other week
  • two self-assessments, one midway and the other at the end

With the exception of the discussion, where I use a technique I am happy with, this is all very presentation-heavy.

I read a lot about constructivism. It’s not that I think students don’t benefit from alternative structures — I do. I’m not even particularly obsessive about content, though I probably should be considering the current work on the Dumbest Generation (either the Michael Graham or Mark Bauerlein version). I have only semi-determined lectures in my on-site sections, and believe that different sets of facts can set us on the same type of path anyway. The idea in history is to be able to use facts, not memorize them. Recognize patterns, create our own patterns, see trends over time.

But I find it hard to break the traditional pattern. They don’t know any facts at all about, say, the 17th century in Europe, so don’t I need to given them those facts? And model tying them together into themes?

Let’s say the answer is no, I’m not needed to do that. The facts are everywhere. Go to Wikipedia. You don’t even need a textbook. Let’s put the stuff together ourselves. Themselves. I envision a web page, or better a set of web pages, where students put in the content: images, sound files of music, bits of text, links to sources, comments of their own. I thought of this awhile back and gave up because everything was too hard to use. A wiki, which seemed the logical choice, required syntax instruction. PLEs based on feeds, like Pageflakes, Netvibes etc. seemed cumbersome and didn’t have all the features. They were awkward to use anyway.

But now we seem to have better alternatives. Tumblr lets you just throw things on the web, but its paradigm seems single user. Zoho Notebook is better. Seems like it could be used like a wiki. Some wikis are easier. A lot of this stuff has ads. What’s left out? The automatic indication of who made the addition to the page, shown on the page so I can grade easily. I’d like the student’s name under whatever they post. That’s more like a blog.

I need a drag-and-drop multi-user blog with tabbed pages that accepts embedded multimedia and doesn’t need an idiot’s guide to use. Right?

Web 2.0 at SUNY Session

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Today I attended (virtually) Laura McGrath‘s presentation at SUNY Learning Network SOL Summit. Laura is Assistant Professor of English and English Department Tech Coordinator at Kennesaw State University, and her talk was “Innovative uses of technology for instructional purposes”. Since I will be presenting this summer at 2008 Online Teaching Conference on a very similar topic, I paid close attention!

A couple of key points she made were not intended to be the focus of her presentation, which demonstrated examples of technologies she uses. She showed how MySpace was used to hook up two classes at two different colleges across the country, and how tools like Diigo (for social bookmarking) and Twitter (for image annotation) could be useful in online classes.

Certainly one key point was that the paradigm of course management systems is not set up for “participatory learning”, collaborative, creative work on the part of students. I couldn’t agree more, and have written a Viewpoint piece for EDUCAUSE on exactly that issue.

Laura also mentioned that it would be nice if such technologies were available in CMSs, since otherwise students have too many different log-ons, and it’s hard to keep track of where they’re working. This makes me think it might be best for faculty to start with just one external technology, like Diigo for a research project or Flickr for art history annotations.

Another issue that kept coming up was how to help faculty, many of whom are not as into these web 2.0 technologies as our students. Play is important, and she said instructors really appreciate time and guidance in playing with the new technologies, what she called “serious play”. I’d like to provide more of that through the Program workshops, perhaps next fall.

Trying Furl

Lisa M Lane

A lot of my online lectures, written as ordinary web pages, have links out to websites. Often these websites go down, or are unavailable, or have disappeared when students click. I have three online classes with about 15 lectures each, and most of them have links out, so I can’t keep up with all of them. Sometimes students are good about reporting downed links, and I can replace them with something else. Usually the something else isn’t as good as the page I originally wanted them to see!

So I’m going to try Furl. Furl is a social bookmarking site that archives the actual pages, caches them so that the old version is available. I just started today. It looks like when I Furl a website (which I can do with a browser button), I can tag it. Then when I see the list of my archived sites, I can click on the “F” symbol, and a window comes up asking which version I want to see. Right-clicking the “cached” gives me a URL, and I can use this to link to the archived version. (Since it’s social, I can also share the list of links, though I’m not quite sure who would care.)

I’m hoping this will prevent having to update links a lot, and will preserve those pages I wanted my students to use for reference, even if the sites themselves vanish. I understand it doesn’t cache whole sites, only pages, but usually it’s only the page I want, often because it has good images or a brief explanation of the concept in lecture.

It will, of course, take a long time, and the job strikes me as vaguely secretarial rather than instructional. I wonder….

Web 2.0 and the Corporation

Lisa M Lane

Should we worry about corporate domination of the internet, and of our information, as we teach online? Do our college-age students worry?

D’arcy Norman notes in his blog post about Facebook that students today seem inordinately comfortable sharing a lot of personal information wth big corporations that want your data so they can make money off it. He mentions Google, which is beginning to dominate Web 2.0 apps among educators, and proprietary course management systems, which trap content and then erase it.

For a number of faculty, the answer to this corporate nonsense with course management systems is cobbling together your own. Creating your own CMS is called “loosely coupled teaching” by Scott Leslie, as I discovered at Martin Weller’s blog via Stephen Downes’ blog. Yeah, Web 2.0 is my tech info source!

So we can each create our own system for teaching our classes. This means we gotta share our opinions of what the good tools are. I followed Weller’s linke to blogquiz for informal assessments, but it has advertising. In fact, the animated ad kept the page from loading quickly into my browser. Pbwiki has advertising. And a great many other things that are fun to use.

Most of my students are capable of ignoring the advertising, which in itself speaks to their lack of concern about it. I can’t ignore it, which may be a vestige of my radical views during my younger years. I work for a public educational institution. I don’t want the pages I use for learning to have advertising links. They’re all intrusive, even if they’re just text (like pbwiki’s). It’s like having advertising posters in my classroom, which I find similarly unacceptable. And if I cobble together a number of apps to do what I want, I’m assisting the advertisers even more.

Of course, I understand that ads are the price I pay for “free” web 2.0 applications. I also understand that I could download, and host myself, we applications based on open source code. I’m willing to do this in a minor way. But since I don’t write code (although I can steal what I need), I feel stuck. I’m waiting for the day when public colleges host their own stuff because it’s so obviously useful, like chalkboards and data projectors.

I have always been opposed to corporate domination of anything (education through Channel One, our government through lobbyists and contributions, software through Windows). Like D’Arcy, I am concerned about the sharing of so much personal information. At the same time, I know that my insurance company and the online stores I buy things from can put my whole life on the web without my permission. That is the cost of the convenience of using the internet. I suspect that students don’t “trust” Facebook or Google any more than I do. But they shrug off the “convenience fee” while I worry, and try (uselessly, I’m sure) to mitigate the effect on myself and my students.

The 2.0 Fear Factor

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Having just finished editing my opinion piece on how CMSs limit pedagogy, I happen to find Fear 2.0, currently being discussed at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Conference in San Antonio, in a session entitled “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0” All the media is posted here.

Several videos were part of this project:

Although I’ve been promoting playing on the web, it never occurred to me that fear was related to anything other than security issues (school admins blocking websites, etc.). Although I do not yet live a full 2.0 life like some of these amazing innovators, I can see how fear of a number of things can be factors in stagnation: fear of change, democracy, looking stupid, losing control, freedom. And although I often think it’s the technology that’s not moving fast enough for me, perhaps people are moving slowly too.

Interesting Web 2.0 Apps

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I’m creating a list of apps I can actually recommend because I’ve used them myself or know people who have.

Right now I’m exploring:
Snap Shot: when you mouse over a URL, a little window pops up previewing site
PikiWiki (alpha): drag and drop creation and collaboration with pics, audio, video
Flaming Text: create artistic graphic text for web page
UStreamTV: video conferencing the easier way, with chat

Recommended list of recommendations:
* Top 100 Tools for Learning 2007: list by type of tool

Wikis:
* Wikispaces (has ads)
* PB Wiki (has ads)

Recommended forums: Any suggestions here? I’ve been using Moodle’s, but there are good free ones elsewhere, I know!

Blogging:
* Edublogs: free blog-hosting for teachers and students
* Class Blogmeister: designed for teacher-student interaction

Social bookmarking:
* Del.icio.us: still the best and easiest to use and share

Slideshows/narrated presentation:
* VoiceThread — slideshows with audio, text comments, doodling on slides, video importing
* Slideshare — share slideshows, PP presentations, slidecast with mp3 audio
* Bubbleshare — each slide has 30 sec audio clip

Image annotation:
* Flickr: share photos, also annotate them with little text boxes

Desktop-style apps:
* Zoho: word processor, spreadsheet, collaborative docs, presentation, etc. all web-based

Video streaming:
* UStream TV: for producing and sharing live video

Synchronous Collaboration:
* YackPack: voice groups, photo highlighted as person speaks
* $ Elluminate: web conferencing with voice, chat, whiteboard

Virtuality:
* Voki: make a cartoon character of yourself with audio
* Second Life: virtual world

Community:
* Ning: create your own social network

Self-publishing:
* Lulu: publish, sell books, prints as orders come in

RSS Aggregator:
* Feedraider: all feeds on one page with mouseover summaries

Video sources:
* TeacherTube: instructional clips for embedding
* YouTube: still the biggest collection

Desktop apps:
* Camstudio: PC only, but creates AVI movies of desktop screen activity