Category: Online Teaching

My bit of bookshelf

Lisa M Lane

Inspired by Steve Wheeler’s photograph of some of his books, I did a little online shopping and ordered some of the books he’s read that I’ve been wanting to read for awhile (Smart Mobs, Here Comes Everybody, and Tribes). Then I took a photo of a bit of my own shelf. I’d love it if a bunch of people I read (both online and in books) would do this!

We won’t get into how much neater his shelf is than mine, right?

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Qualities of innnovation in online instructors

Lisa M Lane

I am considering what experiences and qualities make faculty members “innovative” when it comes to online teaching.

I’m thinking what’s necessary is:

1. Openness in their work — sharing class materials on the open web, using the materials of others, appreciating Creative Commons, blogging ideas.

2. Theory or research – A theoretical background, through reading or education or networking, in learning and how it’s done online. The ability to explore the research and come to ones own philosophy about applying it to ones own work.

3. Membership or activity in groups, learning communities and organizations that promote innovation in online education, such as the The New Media Consortium, Classroom 2.0, EdTechTalk, the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge open courses, and ones own personal learning network through social media.

4. Publication – by blogging and/or in journals promoting innovation, such as in education, IRRODL , EDUCAUSE Quarterly, and many other excellent open access journals.

5. Creation – use of open web applications and emerging technologies for creating materials, and a desire to create ones own materials that are engaging and meet learning goals.

6. Technicality – Some kind of backstage experience: writing HTML, programming, etc.

7. An understanding that online teaching is its own discipline.

Some of the things that I think that show lack of innovation are:

1. Closed work – where everything is behind a password and copyrighted.

2. Degrees from and teaching at institutions that require a “team” approach to course design instead of individual instructors designing their own classes (examples: National, Argosy, Ashford, University of Pheonix, Rio Salado, and anywhere under investigation by the federal government for False Claims).

3. Membership or activity in groups or organizations particular to ones discipline, but not engaged with online innovation, or in groups that say they are innovative but are primarily business oriented, with lots of sponsors from #4 and #5 below (this includes the League for Innovation in the Community College, EDUCAUSE, CUE, and any other group that seems to have strayed from its roots or charges $995 in conference registration fees).

4, Publication in journals that keep everything behind a paywall and charge high prices ($35/article) for viewing, such as journals published by Springer, Taylor & Francis, etc.

5. Extensive experience with traditional Course Management Systems (e-College, Blackboard, Moodle) using all the internal tools but nothing open, sometimes accompanied by full use of publisher course cartridges.

6. Use of exclusively high-level, high-cost, proprietary tools from major vendors (Adobe, Apple) for creating materials, which are then loaded into a CMS.

7. Strictly “front office” experience, always implementing someone else’s idea.

8. A perception that online teaching is a mode of instruction, a venue, an alternative, the future, or a field of knowledge that begins with technology instead of pedagogy.

Cell phones, driving and social learning

Lisa M Lane

There have been a number of studies showing that talking on a cell phone while driving causes more accidents than other things. I never understood that. It seemed to me that the various other things people do while driving (putting on makeup, eating a hamburger, masturbating) would be just as distracting. So would arguing with the person sitting in the passenger seat, gesticulating as you go.

A 2008 study from Carnegie Mellon came to my attention in a recent issue of The Economist, countering this idea. The study noted that when someone is physically in the car, they temper their conversation to suit the traffic conditions, because they can see that a busy intersection is approaching or a hazard is ahead. This explains why talking on a hands-free phone doesn’t help. It’s almost as if the passenger’s awareness of conditions offsets the danger of vociferously defending your habit of leaving the cap off the toothpaste.

—-
Flickr cc The Aardvark

The other interesting finding was that the brain works very hard to listen to the phone conversation: the “driving-while-listening condition produced a 37 percent decrease in activity of the brain’s parietal lobe”, which deals with spatial issues.

I think both findings are significant to understanding online learning challenges.

First, we all know that some students seem to require an on-site, face-to-face class in order to learn. They take online classes for the convenience, but some are self-aware enough to realize that they need a traditional classroom experience. They may feel isolated or have technological trouble. But they may also need the people around them, the front-seat passengers that can help them interpret what’s ahead.

I’m not sure whether there are studies on this factor. But I know I have students who are not very aware of what’s going on in class, and I see and feel them use other students’ reactions to determine appropriate behavior. I wonder whether this awareness helps them decide when to pay close attention, when to blow off information (particularly from a colleague) and when to study (I watch my whole class work together very efficiently right before a class exam).

We believe that this generation in particular has a group mentality. Pam Cox-Otto gave a presentation at the college a number of years ago, claiming that students who were children during the 9/11 tragedy feel that they are safe only in numbers. They come to office hours in groups, and their basic life philosophy can be honed to “I’ve got your back”. We also know that internet use is both building and encouraging a kind of “hive mind” or collective thinking (see Jaron Lanier and others).

—-
Flickr cc Earlham College

So it seems entirely possible to me that some students must have fellow interpreters sitting near them. To self-directed people like myself, this almost seems like a form of mild autism, requiring others to interpret the situation for you so you can learn.

In an online environment, if we combine the two findings, we have a learning environment that may be void of physical cues. This challenge has typically been met by greater instructor presence and various techniques to help decrease the distance (screencasts, talking head video, voice). There have also been many studies of community (see Rick Schwier among others), and how it forms, and we encourage faculty to create such community in their courses. We do it so that the students will learn together effectively and feel part of a group, but we may also be doing it to substitute for the physical presence of fellow interpreters.

Rethinking assessment

Lisa M Lane 7 Comments

After 23 years, it’s certainly not for the first time that I’m rethinking assessment. In fact, it’s more like 32 years, since I was a TA in grad school and earned money as a grader in both high school and college.

Grading is massively time consuming and increasingly depressing. I get such joy out of creating both materials and active spaces for my classes, and then have to grade work that demonstrates either cognitive inability or lack of studying, sloppiness, or misunderstandings of what I requested. I comment, I give feedback, but see little improvement, but the real problem is I have 200 students. I just can’t get as individualized as I would like.

The meta-problem is that the assessments aren’t teaching the students. I am a teacher. Everything I do should teach the students. When I’m teaching, I’m happy. And I don’t mean “direct instruction” — any time I’m involved in their learning, things are good. Assessment seems like judgment. Even when I give them study guides containing all the multiple choice questions, pre-tests, practices, weekly skill review, I still have to write too many bad scores. I don’t want to judge their work as inferior or superior. I realize I’m judging just a segment of what they produce in this world, and that I’m forbidden from stepping over that boundary.

I know what you’re thinking. Use rubrics! I do use rubrics, and even have my online students do self-assessments of how well their work is fitting the rubric. They do learn something from those (usually that they haven’t been keeping up) but that’s only twice per semester. The rest of it is seven quizzes, partly multiple choice and partly essay. The essays take so much time and the problems with them are so consistent that I could use a drop-down menu to make comments. Writing a decent historical essay is the main skill we practice all semester. But to let them know if they’re doing it right, I have to grade them. One at a time. And see my work reflected in their grades, which, regardless of pedagogy, create a pretty standard bell curve all on their own.

I’m a college instructor. I make my own tests. When I was in university and in graduate school, each class had a midterm, a research paper, and a final exam. That was it. That didn’t work for community college students, so we have quizzes every two weeks. Please understand I came to this method after years of trying other ways. And I know that not all students are there to obtain grades, good or bad. They may just be passing through my class on their way to other things.

So I’m working on reconceptualizing, again. I have studied constructivist and connectivist methods, and have come to the conclusion that I can’t do many of those wonderful things with 200 students per semester, at least not as the guiding force of my class. I also do believe in core content and core skills for my discipline — I’ve tried to jettison that old-style thinking but can’t because I really believe that knowledge of historical facts and methods has intrinsic value. I don’t think most of the “make history fun” exercises (i.e. use Twitter to recreate the Crimean War) are for me — they have little to do with historical skills.

So I’m talking to people online, and looking at things like the NY Times article about studying, and discussion of John Hattie’s work. It was a relief to note that Hattie shows that student achievement is determined mostly by rapid feedback, students’ prior cognitive ability, and instructional quality. This last is defined through the abilities of an “expert teacher”:
1. can identify essential representations of their subject,
2. can guide learning through classroom interactions,
3. can monitor learning and provide feedback,
4. can attend to affective attributes, and
5. can influence student outcomes

The first three I get no problem. #4 I’ve been trying to convince colleagues of for years, and it’s the one I feel least equipped to do (aside from extreme emoticon use). The last seems circular — you are a good teacher if you can get the students to learn.

So I’ve been focusing on the feedback idea. Then on Tuesday, as part of #edchat Twitter discussion, Julian Ridden (@moodleman) retweeted something from Colin Matheson:

The CMS doesn’t matter, but certainly computers are good at immediate feedback for multiple choice questions. On my quizzes, they have to wait till I grade the essay, and by then it might have been a week since they’ve seen the quiz. If Matheson is right, by that point they might care only about the score. Students don’t often read comments on tests in class (they come up and show me a test on which I’ve written copious comments, saying “why did I get a C?”). They don’t read them in my online classes, partly because they don’t know how to see the comments, even though I tell them how in every announcement that their tests have been graded, in a video announcement, and on the FAQ (I just got a message from a student today telling me she’d just figured out how to see her graded quiz, and that she’s sorry she did the same thing on this essay as the last one since she can now see my comments).

So I could break up the quizzes, with weekly multiple-choice quizzes that have immediate feedback. The essay could be an Assignment in Moodle, so that I could use a drop-down scale to tell them how the essay performed, if they’re interested.

But I wonder if there should be more. If the assessment is for teaching, then, like discussion, it could be the course (next post). In the meantime, providing immediate feedback more often, and automating essay feedback, might help. But I have much more work to do on this issue.

Simple broadcasting from class

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Sometimes students need to stay home. In fact, my “don’t you dare come to class sick” policy says they must.

I’ve been finding ways of broadcasting my class so they can attend from home, and this is the simplest yet.

I set up my laptop with built-in webcam and just open a room in TinyChat. I click “Start Broadcasting”, and it selects my camera and broadcasts to whoever is in the TinyChat room. This is the same thing we’ve been using for groups to contact group members at home, just with the camera on me.

Audio has been trickier. The audio pickup on my iMac isn’t good at a distance, though it’s better than the omnidirectional mic I tried, which is obviously better for meetings where the mic is 6 feet or less away.

Eyejot in Moodle for quick video message

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

http://www.eyejot.com/flash/embed_player.swf?m=2DA8DD11116C6C00006698BD58

It adds instructor presence to a course to have video of yourself, so I started the semester with a quick video message. I recorded it in iTunes and had to use Quicktime to get it the right side, then embed it in a Moodle HTML block. Not very “user friendly”, though.

So today I tried Eyejot, which had been recommended to me by my colleague Pilar Hernàndez. It was super quick. I recorded the video, then had it emailed to myself. Following the link brought me to the page where I found the Embed code, which I then pasted into a Moodle HTML block. I sized it down in the block to 200 X 200 (their default size is too big).

This block is located at the top, and it looks different so I hope they see it as new. The quick (under 60 second) video plays in the block, situating me in the “classroom”.

I cannot tell so far whether this will help prevent the private emailed questions to me, most of which are already answered in the FAQ and are driving me crazy. There seem to be more than usual this semester, as well as students telling me the reason they’re having trouble is because they “don’t know anything about computers”. But it can’t hurt!

Did you bring enough for everyone?

Lisa M Lane

This semester, in my on-site San Elijo class, I got the usual notice from Disabled Student Services saying I have a student in my class who needs a notetaker.

It’s actually been awhile since I’ve gotten such a request. Usually the requests are for extended time on tests. In my online class, this doesn’t matter because my tests aren’t timed, and at San Elijo we can always make an accomodation.

But a note taker? I lecture on the fly. I did spend time last semester teaching them to take notes. Well, OK…

So I made the announcement and asked who might want to take notes. The reward is either $50 or a letter of recommendation for your file. Two students indicated interest. One was taking his notes that day on a laptop. He also was an Honors student, introduced himself, and asked for class time to advertise the Honors program. He said he wouldn’t take too much of my time in class. I told him the time in class is our time, not my time, and please do.

Then it occurred to me. He’s taking notes on a laptop, not scribbling on the silly duplicate forms they give notetakers. So we can post them for everyone, not just the disabled student. I asked our new notetaker, and he said he wouldn’t mind at all.

So now we have a resource for everyone.

Best. Workshop. Ever.

Lisa M Lane 6 Comments

On Thursday, the Program for Online Teaching facilitated a workshop we called, depending on where you looked it up, “Where the Hell Do I Start?”, “Start Here!” or “Beginners Workshop”. A one-day, seven-hour experience, we had a full house of 24 (and more on the wait list), almost all of whom rated the workshop “Extremely Useful”. Here’s our formula:

1. A 1-hour online synchronous planning session with the facilitators to come up with the idea (after a grueling “how do I do this?” session in August where attendees clearly wanted their hand held as they clicked a mouse),
2. A 5-hour planning session with two workshop leaders (fueled by coffee in cups the size of your head),
3. Dedicated, knowledgeable, calm, reliable, flexible, volunteer facilitators in an approximate ratio of 1-to-3 with attendees,
4. A firm commitment to:
* avoid anything that might cause the workshop to be taken over by one instructor’s needs or technical questions
* avoid any technical or educational jargon (I was forbidden from saying “instructivist” and “connectivism”, for example)
* avoid focusing on tools instead of teaching
5. A pattern of activity that uses a classroom for presenting and collaborative work, and a lab for individual playing and help, and going back and forth between them to keep everyone moving,
6. A $20 fee to not only pay for lunch but add value and responsibility to the idea of attendance, and
7. Good facilities and a crucial teaspoon of technical support.

Can’t wait for the description of what we did? No need to wait till the movie comes out — here it is.

[vimeo 19056991 w=400 h=300]

Beginners Workshop from Program for Online Teaching on Vimeo.

The objectives

Goal: Provide novice and beginning online instructors with direction in creating their first online class, and an opportunity to focus on their own needs.

By the end of this workshop, beginning online workshop participants will:
1. be assisted in determining their own online pedagogy for one class
2. set up and storyboard an online class
3. set up Blackboard to match their own pedagogy as expressed on their storyboard
4. determine which course design elements to add
5. review a road map of resources to learn how to add these elements

The set-up

Got approval through professional development
Workshop announced two months in advance by newsletter, email, and on the POT website
Each participant signed up through professional development’s website
Each participant paid $20 to Academic Senate for lunch and materials
Participation limited to 24 attendees (the max in the computer lab)
One facilitator bought pastries and one two dispensers of Starbuck’s coffee
Another facilitator brought drinks for lunch
Lunch of sandwiches, salad, breadsticks and cookies ordered from Pat and Oscars with delivery
Porfolios created by one leader with POT stickers (not the Chinese kind, made at Office Depot), and the following pages:

What we did

Coffee and pastries in the courtyard 8:45
Nametags for all.

9:00-9:30 Classroom: Show and Tell
We passed out the packets.
Pilar welcomed attendees and introduced the Show and Tell videos:
Jill’s screencast
Lisa’s screencast
John Turbeville’s screencast
Janeen’s screencast
Pilar’s screencast
Lisa worked the technology (played the videos).

9:30-11:00 — Classroom: Understanding the Guiding Force of your pedagogy
-Pilar briefly described to attendees what would happen throughout the day.
-Lisa led them through the Questionnaire so they could start to understand their teaching style and goals. Talked about how each score might lead toward focusiing more on either presentation or interactivity.
-Pilar asked them to get with the person next to them to discuss what their Guiding Force is when they think about their class. Facilitators circulated amongst the groups to help them figure that out– what guides your class? (Your syllabus, Textbook, Course pre-made software, SLOs,…)
– Pilar shared examples of 2 course designs and how they are organized (based on guiding force), allowing questions but limiting them to course design
– Participants created their own draft of a course map from a blank storyboard, separately or in pairs as they preferred – presenters walked them through essential components (which were listed on worksheet for guidance), for about 20 minutes

11:00 Computer Lab: Using Blackboard to set up a course your way
– Pilar demonstrated how to set up Blackboard to match their pedagogy by first erasing all menu items and anything forcing Bb’s innate pedagogy
– Everyone assisted, and Karen Korstad from Academic Info Services set up blank Bb classes to play with

12:20 lunch on the patio 4800 building, dealt with the fact that Pat and Oscars didn’t bring forks (a good lesson in the need for appropriate technologies)

1:00 Classroom: Determining what you need to learn to create what you want
– Jim and Jill focused on “what do you need to know now?” — determining knowledge needs so they could list what kind of tools they might want to use to fulfill their goals (synchronous meeting, short video, audio recording, etc.).
– The rest of us were on hand to help with questions, discussion.
[The goal: Determine which elements you need to add to your online class based on your pedagogy for your class, and produce a comprehensive needs list — what categories of tools?]

2:00 Computer Lab: Accessing Resources, tools and help
Lisa + Karen presented Resources and Help, Jill demonstrated how to set up voice communication inside Bb since there was much interest in that; we got out the headsets for people to play with Wimba, Audacity or Eyejot, but couldn’t do Jing because the lab didn’t have it installed

3:00 Classroom: How do we prepare students?
We all returned to the classroom to discuss: based on what each instructor plans to create, what will students need in order to understand how their class works and be prepared (including technologically) to participate fully? Lisa led discussion of what individual faculty need their students to know how to do, and wrote a list on the whiteboard. Then we listed ways to make sure that happens, through syllabus quizzes, low-stakes usage and tutorials. We sent everyone back to the lab on their way out to do the survey.

Feedback

We got immediate feedback via SurveyMonkey, which all but one attendee filled out.

Of attendees, 56% were associate faculty, 44% were full-timers.

Experience: 74% had never taught an online class.

Goals: 87% took the workshop to enhance their teaching skills.

Satisfaction: 87% said the workshop was “Extremely useful” in fulfilling their goals.

Among the things participants found most useful was access to expert teachers, help setting up their course, a thorough introduction to key components of getting started, seeing what others were doing, being introduced to various tools, and “Understanding that these online instructors do not let the technology drive the course”.

Among the things participants wanted was more attention to their individual questions, the avoidance of too much computer detail, and 2 or 3-day workshops.

Of the activities they might consider participating in now that they’d taken the workshop, 83% wanted more workshops, 78% intended to explore online tools independently, 78% were interested in POT’s Online Teaching Certificate, 65% planned to participate in the new automated online Blackboard training, 57% would participate in Bb workshops, 39% intended to discuss online teaching issues in their department, and 9% intended to start their own blog.

Lessons learned

We consider that we have both inspired and educated 23 people to become independent, pedagogically-driven online instructors, and couldn’t be happier. Suggestions for ourselves:

  • Make sure the computer folks don’t reimage computers on the day before or day of the conference.
  • Get Starbucks to put the milk in containers that actually pour.
  • Get Pat and Oscars to bring forks to prevent raiding of people’s offices at the last minute.
  • More cookies.
  • Make an open board for participants to post questions that can be addressed throughout the day.

Another take, Mr DeMille

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Yesterday we hosted our first all-day Beginners Workshop for new online instructors, and as part of our information we talked about making a brief welcome video. I had made one, so we played it to the group.

http://lisahistory.net/media/IntroSpring11-2.mov

As I was watching myself, I was thinking, “this is really bad…I look so serious” at the same time as my colleague Pilar was saying “make it light! you’re not reporting the news!” I decided to redo on campus today instead of at my desk, but I forget so I did it using my laptop at a stoplight on the drive home after a miserable orientation:

http://lisahistory.net/media/drivinggreeting3.mov

I’m removing the first one and putting this one on my classes. (They’re small because they’re going in a tiny Moodle box.)

Sometimes even informal is too formal.

Seven things I’d want to know as a new online teacher

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

This started as a “things I wish I knew” list, but these are the biggies I’ve learned in 12 years of teaching online:

1. Save everything on your own hard drive.
Course management systems, and access to them, come and go. I now create all quizzes, discussion prompts and extensive directions (the things I plug into a CMS) in plain text files, then use copy-and-paste to put them into whatever system.

2. Serve yourself.
Serve your creations from a server where you rent space rather than the college’s server — link to or embed everything. You never know who’ll decide they own your stuff, or when resources won’t be available. And that “Web 2.0” company (think Ning) could go premium or be gone entirely tomorrow.

3. Trying to reduce workload can lead to better creativity.
Most online classes at public institutions contain too many students. Learning techniques of grouping students, clustering assignments, and using templates for activities is invaluable.

4. Online teaching is its own discipline, and we need to study it.
It’s not just a “method of delivery” or a “format” — it’s its own field, with a whole community of practitioners in K-12, college, training and consulting. It pays to be in touch with people who know the latest trends. Entire careers are being built by people who know nothing about teaching, but get advanced degrees researching it so they can get jobs and tell you what to do. Not knowing the jargon or the research, and being able to critique it, could mean less autonomy in your own work.

5. Knowing HTML will be a boon more times than you can count.
Entering (or copying and pasting — see #1) text into WYSIWYG editors inside various systems does not give you enough control. When something goes wrong (the text looks bad, the paragraph doesn’t indent correctly, the bulleting is mixed up) , clicking on < > and fixing it saves loads of time. Also, knowing just a bit of code means you can use other people’s cool ideas and plug them in yourself.

6. Sharing is important.
Current trends show that the “wild west” nature of the open web is moving toward more closed applications (think Facebook). Large media companies now dominate the web, but so far, access is low-threshold. This means we can share our work with each other just by putting it on the open web. Innovation, help, ideas, and reflection result from doing this.

7. Content isn’t a course.
More and more universities (Harvard, MIT, Berkeley) are offering their lectures freely and openly. But content isn’t a course — just plugging in someone else’s material doesn’t make it a class, much less your class. This is also true of publisher-created content. Student’s highest priority remains learning from the teacher, whether directly or through the pedagogy designed by the instructor. If you’re not creating the content pathway and facilitating the learning at every step, you’re not the teacher.

A possible SOOC set-up

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Having decided what to do about my SOOC (Small Open Online Class or Semi-Open Online Class, depending on how crazy it gets), I set up a WordPress blog to do it.

104blog

Basic steps to installing WordPress:

– Downloaded current WP.
– Created a new database in Control Panel – MySQL. (I have Lunarpages hosting.)
– Changed the config file and uploaded all files according to the Five Minute Instructions.
– Logged in to new blog.
– Installed Atahualpa theme.
– Added plugins:
Comment Form Toolbar — to allow students to add images by URL.
Comment Image
Comment Image Embedder is now… -> Comment-Images — — to allow students to add images by URL
Editable Comments (didn’t work) –> Edit Comments added and we’ll see
Email Users — so I can email all users
Insere Iframe — so I can use iframes to display pages, like the syllabus and Engrade book
User photo — so students can have a photo with their account
Custom Meta — so I can give instructions in the title of the Meta box and leave out the wordpress.org link

Stuff that didn’t work last time and won’t work this time:
Students use Reply (comment, essentially) to add their material — nothing in the universe lets them edit their own comments without editing everyone’s, so they can’t edit their comments once they’re posted.

Embedding my web pages

I have static web pages elsewhere for things like Grading policies and the Syllabus. The tabs at the top are Pages, so I createdone for each page, but to get a static web page to embed in an iframe is a little tricky, and involved templates.

In a plain text document, I have to create a template for each page, naming it something obvious, and saving it in the atahualpa folder.

They look like this (this one is called “iframetemplatehome.php”):

templatecode

and have to be saved as .php.

Atahualpa theme options

I discovered last semester that the Atahualpa theme is the best for something like this, because it lets you customize everything.

I got rid of the Posts and Comments images in the upper right corner — my typical students won’t know what they are, and Guest Students can use the text links at the bottom. I got rid of the “You may use these HTML tags” from above the comment windows by turning it off in Style & Configure Comments. (I don’t need it with the Comment toolbars, and they confuse people.)

For the header, I added three images to the themes-atahualpa-images-header folder, all 1200 w x 160 h. I added image credits and the college logo to plain HTML widgets.

For users I allowed anyone to register, then used the About the Class page to ask Guest Students not to register. I removed all the Links, then stole an idea from Jim Groom’s ds106 class and added the Add Links plugin so I have a widget where if anyone is working on the course at their own blog, they can add a link.

I made categories for each task (Post Theses Here! and Groupwork), and more child categories for each week and each group. I had to add a post to the Theses and Groupwork categories to get them to show, but I scheduled the Theses items to appear after the previous homework was due so they couldn’t post too far ahead and wouldn’t get confused.

I added the Simply Exclude plug in so that all posts to the Groupwork and Theses categories don’t appear on the main page. This way all discussion can be on the main page without other stuff interfering (like a…blog).

Now on to what I didn’t do last time — create scheduled posts for each week so that everyone (on-site students and Guest Students) can discuss some cool issues for each era. That will be the fun part!

You can take a peek. Suggestions welcome!

Virtual Attendance, Part II

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Purpose: Have a student at home view me lecturing in real time
Tools: Tinychat, computer with webcam

I did not expect this to become a series, but I keep trying new things. My students at San Elijo are wonderfully willing to help out with ways for their sick-at-home colleagues to participate in class, so we’re experimenting.

Last time, we used Chatterous and Skype to have two students participate with their group.

Today was a lecture day, and a student wrote to say she had a yucky cold (I have a firm policy against students attending when sick). I had already planned to record the lecture with my mp3 player and post it with the slides (Slideshare’s audio sync is now working again). But she mentioned she’d be available online all through class time, just like on a lab day. I thought, why not let her attend in real time?

I asked about Skype, but she didn’t use Skype (she replied from her iPhone). I remembered that Tinychat has something broadcast-y with audio and video — we had tried it just as a chat room once in class. I opened that Tinychat room I’d created before, surprised it was still there. I tested it briefly in my office, but couldn’t tell whether you needed to log in or not. (Students in the room last time told me some couldn’t enable their camera unless they were somehow logged in.)  Then there was the issue of sound. I wanted to use a real microphone, since the classroom’s computer is about 15 feet away from where I pace and speak at the front of the room. I grabbed the big microphone on my desk and my mp3 player and went to class a few minutes early.

In the classroom, I plugged in my fancy schmancy Snowball microphone into the iMac, opened Tinychat, and just entered the chat room as me without logging in. I clicked Broadcast. It showed me, very clearly, with the front of the room, also clear, behind me. My student was there, and typed that she could see.

I needed to test the sound so I looked around and one of my students was using his laptop. I asked if he’d mind coming into the chat and check if he could hear me. He came into the room, his camera coming on instantly. He couldn’t hear me, but the student at home said she could. WTF? It turned out my voice was coming to her through his computer – we couldn’t get the Snowball to work, even though I quickly tried all three settings. The whole time, another student helped us test, having me turn off the room audio to prevent feedback, etc. Everyone was very laid back and it was  no big deal. At 5 minutes after the hour, I wrote to the at-home student we needed to start. She could just use the slide links I posted and she could hear through her colleagues’ in-class computer.

But instead, the student with the laptop got up and put it on a desk at the front of the room facing me. Now the student at home could see me, see the slides, and hear me too. I went ahead with the lecture. At about 40 minutes, my mp3 player died (low battery). When my students were in groups working, I unplugged the Snowball and tested sound with my at-home student by using the iMac’s internal mic. She could hear me from 15 feet away, no problem.

So this is what we could do next time. If I don’t have someone with a laptop (I could bring mine), I can open Tinychat on the class computer and use its internal microphone, clicking broadcast. If I do have a laptop, we can do the same thing with a laptop in front of me.

And this Snowball is going out to pasture.

Attribution Matters

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

As I noted in today’s blog post for EC&I831 class, I’ve been reading Jaron Lanier. And doing that makes me think about attribution. At the very least, I would like to attribute as much of the stuff I find on the web as possible, particularly stuff that is created “from scratch”, both textual and visual.

So today I followed a link from Rodd Lucier in Twitter: http://twitpic.com/31l7sc. It’s the image you see on the left. I noticed that Rodd wrote a query at the bottom for Badd_moon, the person who posted the image, about whether the images were licensed for sharing. With Lanier on the brain, I tried to track it down. On Badd_moon’s Twitpic page, karohemd said:

This led me here so I tweeted that the artist was Scott Beale (laughingsquid in Twitter) and his FAQ said the images were licensed for Creative Commons, so I tweeted that. But then I scrolled down the page and found the real attribution:

Sao Paulo ad agency Moma Propaganda created a wondeful series of retro future ads for Facebook, YouTube and Skype as part of the “Everything Ages Fast” ad campaign for Maximidia Seminars.

and the update saying high-res images could be downloaded from Maximidia.

This seemed like a lot of work to find out who made an image, but I was glad I did it (and not just because Rodd mentioned me on his blog). I somehow felt better knowing that whoever made these (I still don’t have an artist’s name) was paid for his work. By someone. Somewhere in Brazil. I think.

Virtual Attendance: “Here!”

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

To see the weirdness of this story, first keep one thing in mind: I have no attendance policy. What I have is 10% of the final grade as “Contribution”. I changed it from “Participation”. That’s it. I indicated they were free to come and go, and I only occasionally take roll.

This semester, students are bringing laptops for “lab day”, when each group posts a thesis with supporting visuals at my new WordPress-based class website. They work for about half an hour together, then each group’s work is put up on the screen and they get up and talk about what they did. I use the reports to construct essay questions for tests.

Last time we had “lab”, two students emailed me they’d be missing class. I suggested they come to their group’s website workspace during class time from home, and see if they could watch what was being posted and maybe contribute a picture or two.

These workspaces are asynchronous, just a category page for each group with comments enabled. Some groups have one person write their thesis and post images in a single reply, while other students go out on the web finding images or help construct the thesis. Both students were from the same group, so I told them to post a reply saying they were there. That seemed slow. So I opened a chat room in Chatterous (I couldn’t remember Stinto, which is better). They posted in the replies to come to the chat room, and eventually both students did. That was cool.

Today was more cool. Three students couldn’t come, but only one emailed me. I opened a Stinto chat room immediately (this was an hour before class, and Stinto rooms stay open for a couple of hours if not used) and sent her the URL. I also posted it on the syllabus. The other two students, it turned out, found their way there, and before long several groups were in the chat.

But we had time to work — wouldn’t it be better to see and hear the student who had emailed? I asked how we could do that. One student said we could use Skype. I asked, “do you have Skype on her computer?” She said, “We all have Skype”. So she opened Skype and told the student in the chat room her Skype name, and the student could hear and see her group.

It was pretty thrilling to call roll (well, I did it today) and automatically call her name, not thinking, and hear a resounding “Here!” from the laptop. The other two students were fine with Stinto chat or just helping in the workspace: one provided just the picture Group 6 needed of the Pantheon and couldn’t find.

What’s all the participation about? Are we having fun building things and working together? My only goal was to make the collection, processing and reporting of resources easier, but students seem to care about being there to the point where they’ll be there, wherever they are. “Here!” indeed!

Embedding Editable Cheat Sheets for Students in WordPress (Atahualpa theme)

Lisa M Lane

This idea was inspired by Michael Wesch’s A Portal to Media Literacy, via Alec Couros’s EC&I 831 class, which I’m taking this semester. The video reminded me that I used to have students use PBWiki (now PBWorks) to create the multiple choice questions for each test. Now I just post a cheat sheet with all the questions I’ll choose from. So it’s available for print, and they do print it, but often don’t see each other to work together till 5 minutes before the exam. Why not make it easy for them to collaborate in advance?

I tried to add a wiki plug-in to the WordPress blog, but had about as much success with that as I’ve had getting it to let students edit their own comments — none.

So instead I created the cheat sheet as a Google Doc anyone who had the link could edit (I decided not to keep track of who was doing what). I want to embed it fully, have it take up the whole page, just like it’s sitting on the site.

In using a WordPress blog as a CMS, I found I needed to embed the various web pages and sites I use. When I used iframe to do this in Atahaulpa, the frame came out small, even when changing the width and height attributes. The secret (I discovered here) was to make a template for each one.

The steps:

Create New Page

Go into wordpress files — wp-content -> themes -> Atahualpa

Create iframe template:


<?php
/*
Template Name: Iframe Name
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>

Website of Example.com

<iframe src=”http://yoursite.net/page.htm” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”1000″</frame></div>
< ?php get_footer(); ?>

Change Template Name to something descriptive and unique to that one page (such as Iframe Syllabus).

Change src to the page URL.

Save with .php extension.

Upload.

Go to edit the Page.

Select proper template from the list.

Now it shows up properly, as a full page.

The Unbearable Lightness of Lecturing

Lisa M Lane

I tried to lecture last week, I really did. The topic was Ancient Greece, the class in a classroom with all the gear. I had some good not-too-much-text slides from last semester. I was enthusiastic and colorful. They were interested and paid attention. But I got behind for the first time this semester, and realized coming out of class if I hadn’t lectured, I wouldn’t have gotten behind.

I also should have known better. This class did very poorly on their first exam. Realizing that a lot of the poor performance areas were based on material that was read rather than spoken, and knowing that only half the class has completed college English class, I had given a 1-point extra credit question on the day I returned the quiz. This question was designed to access something they had been active discussing in class (modern cinematic manifestations of Homeric themes, such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings). Yet they did poorly on that also, most unable to connect the themes to the movies.

You just don’t lecture to a class like this. Piling more information onto that already not being assimilated is futile. I have to assume that very little learning is taking place outside the classroom, for whatever reason: apathy, poor reading comprehension skills, high surf, deficits of attention, economic strife, a disappointment with the world. Class time then becomes critical, not for relaying information, but for processing it.

Groups need to work with the material, not reviewing it textually, but creating things from it. Then they need to present it and have it critiqued immediately so that their minds are on the subject when they receive feedback. We also need time for me to pose questions and wait for multiple inputs as they do some thinking. Usually I do this in the projects with laptops, every other Wednesday. Now I think this needs to happen on Mondays, too. I did it yesterday, giving each group two works of art, one Hellenic and one Hellenistic. We’ll see on tomorrow’s exam what happened.

I tell every class that what I do in the room depends on them. This is how that works. For this group, it’s more important to spend focused time on a few key skills and topics than to fly over in an effort to truly “survey” Western Civ to 1648. Sometimes target bombing is bettter than fly-bys. We’ll see how it goes…

As the Moodle(room) Turns

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

Clues and a partial solution to my Moodle Backup and Restore problems have occurred. Only die-hard Moodlers are gonna be interested in this one.

In June, I began the process of trying to Restore some classes off of one Moodlerooms installation (an account I paid for) to MiraCosta’s Moodlerooms’ installation. Backing up a zip file to my own hard drive is fine, but a Moodle installation is needed to Restore so one can see the actual course, if a student has a grade grievance or issue a year or two down the road, or I just want to see how I taught the class back then.

Moodlerooms has provided me good service on my own account at $500 a year, an offer they extended for an additional year beyond when they actually got rid of it for more expensive accounts I couldn’t afford (they extended my offer because I wasn’t notified quickly enough to do anything). So since June, I’ve been trying to figure out how to “move” my recent but completed backed-up courses where I could see them for real at a later date. I had tried to restore into my own Moodle installation, but this had failed. Besides, they are all MiraCosta students, so I thought it would be good to have it in MiraCosta’s account.

[An aside: I wanted my own account because I could administer it, in particular use the Edit Profile function so I could change my students’ passwords for them when they got locked out. MCC’s helpdesk isn’t open evenings and weekends, which is of course when online students need help. In the new version of Moodle, it isn’t even possible to give me that function using permissions — only the admin can do it now.]

You would think that moving classes from one installation to another when both are run by the same vendor would be easy, but we’ve been working on it since June. We did try everything, including having our administrator at the college do the restore — no go. It took a few months to figure out that one problem was the site identifier was the same for both accounts, a discovery which has helped Moodlerooms prevent some problems in the future, but which still hasn’t solved my problem. I am still unable to move a course over with the users, and since student grade and work tracking is what’s important, the courses are useless without the users.

Once the site id was corrected this month, the problem changed — when I try to restore, instead of giving me user errors, now the system strips the users halfway through the restore process, removing all user data. Moodlerooms support was able to upload a course successfully by going through all the student emails and making sure they were the same in both systems. That was a big clue.

It would, of course, take many hours for me to compare lists of 30 or so students from 20 or so courses, making sure that everyone’s email address lines up.

However, the very first user to cause an error, we discovered today, is me, in my student guise. I have an account I call Student A. I enroll Student A in almost all my courses so I can log in as a student and see things. Yes, Moodle has a drop-down to change roles, but it isn’t quite as good as logging in as a student. Because I don’t want to get emails as a student (or have to turn that function off for every class) I use fake emails, and it turned out I hadn’t been consistent about this.

So today, if I went into each course and removed Student A before doing the backup, I was able to Restore successfully, with all users and their work, but only to my own Moodle (one I just use for practice). It still won’t work on Moodlerooms. BUT at least it’s backed up where I can see it! So I have been happily (is that the word?) backing up and restoring courses all day. I am up to 22 courses restored where I can at least see them on my own installation. Out of 22 courses, the system has caught only two student email conflicts, which were easily resolved.

I do not know the moral of this story. Beware vendors raising prices? What you don’t code can hurt you? Whatever it is, I’ve got 22 courses backed up just in case…

The Insanity of the Two Location Workshop

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Yes, we did it back on May 7, and perhaps it was beginner’s luck, but all went well.

We had me in Elluminate with the online participants, and Elluminate showing on the screen in the lab on campus, where Jim Sullivan was presenting. We had a video camera there plugged in as a webcam, and a microphone on a long cord. Online, we could see and hear Jim, and also talk ourselves in the chat. On campus, they could see me (if I had my webcam on), hear me, and read our chat.

We had one volunteer, our wonderful Laura Paciorek. She sat at the computer in the lab, got things hooked up, and communicated with me for set-up and throughout the session using the chat. We had one helper from Media Services, our fantastic cameraman Alan McCarron. The only thing that didn’t work was the room speakers in the campus lab — but the desktop speakers on the presentation computer worked fine so they could hear online participants. The subject was using online resources for professional development.

It went so smoothly that this semester, the Program for Online Teaching will be offering simultaneous on-campus/online workshops on the First Friday of the month at 2:30 pm PT. We’re calling them simulcasts, but since the participants on both sides can actually participate, they really aren’t “casts”. I don’t know what to call what we’re doing.

Our first of the year was last week, on September 3.

We tried for the same setup we had on May 7, but this time I had more support from Media Services, so it got increasingly more complex as more technicians got involved. At least five people from Academic Information Services, in various capacities, responded individually to try to help get this going, even meeting separately for a trial run. Ultimately I think it was made clear that all we needed was a person manning a video camera that can plug into the USB port and act as a webcam, plus a pair of computer speakers in case the room system doesn’t work.

There was some confusion about the camera, because Alan had used a regular video camera (the Sanyo Xacti HD) as a webcam, and it had worked great. When that set-up was tried this time, it didn’t work and the feed was switched to a regular webcam (which had given us a poor image on May 7 so we hadn’t thought of using it).

We had also purchased a USB omnidirectional microphone over the summer, with the idea that it could just be placed in the middle of the campus lab so we could hear the presenter and all participants. This didn’t work, and the presenter ended up carrying the microphone around to be heard properly.

Last, we were told the room speakers were now functional. They weren’t, but we still had the desktop speakers standing by and those did.

As it turned out, we didn’t even need a cameraman, because our newest faculty volunteer, Lyle Blackmon, did a great job managing the camera.

So for next time, we need to:
– use the webcam in the lab
– use the microphone with the long cord in the lab
– keep using the little speakers since the room speakers still don’t work

Our feedback from doing this has been very positive. The late afternoon time on Friday works for both associates and full-timers tied up in meetings till 1:00. Those who really need a f2f experience prefer being in the lab with the facilitator, and those who cannot come to campus appreciate participating online.

The only thing that went really wrong is that I failed to press the Record button in Elluminate before we started! The microphone issue became apparent immediately, and I focused on solving it instead of recording. Ah well, the price of experience. Enjoy what I did record using this link.

First full-out test of WP in class

Lisa M Lane

Today was the first major “test of the system”, using the WordPress blog for student activity.

They have been posting their thesis just fine, but today it was time to use the site in class, as the place for groups to create presentations with images.

I had to add two plug-ins to make the images happen in the first place — one is in Russian (no one seemed to notice) and provides a toolbar with an icon of a picture that lets you add the URL of an image on the internet, and one with a link that lets you add one from your desktop. Most of them used the first one, but they had to help each other figure out how to find the direct URL of an image (rather than the website it was on). I helped a few students with this, but most figured it out.

In my second day survey, 33 of the 40 students (now 38) said they could bring a laptop to class for the days we would use them, but not all did so. I had gone ahead and ordered all six (now eight) laptops from Media Services just in case. These laptops all have dead batteries and have to be plugged in, requiring a series of power strips and students to have to move their groups, but they’re better than no laptop. Last semester each group used only one, but I really needed one laptop per person. A few students tried using their smart phones — iPhones worked best.

Persian-history-5
The task was to find three images of primary sources from before 500 BC and create a thesis about what they had in common. In Ning, each group had its own section. In WordPress, I made each group its own Category, then added a first post. Any member can then Comment to post something, and the image toolbar and link shows up.

The students were somewhat uncertain at first, but I don’t think that was the technology — each group had several people who were happy to experiment and use the machines to complete the task. It’s more that we are new to each other, Labor Day meaning this is only the fifth class I’ve had with them. Also, many did very poorly on the first quiz, so I started the activity after we discussed that and I gave them an additional quickie extra credit question. (If you’re pedagogically curious, this was because I noticed on the test that they did better on questions from lecture than on reading, and I wanted to see if they retained something we talked about after almost two weeks.)

Challenges:
* Students made mistakes but could not edit or delete their own comments. I do not yet see a setting for that. I logged in on the class computer and went to the comments, so group members could come up and delete any mistakes, but of course that meant they could delete anything by mistake. Not a good solution, though it worked for today.
* Unlike Ning, WordPress’ image plug-ins don’t have an intuitive way to resize an image.
* The right side column impeded the main column, making it too narrow — I’ll look into a fix for that.

Cool Things:
* I let groups choose how they wanted to work and present. Some chose having individuals add things; others chose to put it all in one comment.
* Once they got started, they were all working together and going exploring on the laptops. Looked like archaeology with laptops as the tool.
* I noticed during presentations that students used the mouse of the presentation computer in one hand (not on the desktop) so they could control things efficiently while talking — looked cool.

OK, gotta take a look at those settings!

Google Calendar Adventure

Lisa M Lane

Late in July I set up Google Calendars for all my online classes, with reminders of posting and quiz dates. I said I’d see how it worked. The button was this:

Apparently it doesn’t work, at least not the way it was set up. A student contacted me a couple of days ago saying it wouldn’t go into her calendar. I sent her the direct link to the calendar, though, and it worked fine.

The URL for that was:

https://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=dXE0cW5hYTFhZmxlMjFsYWJxNml2M2M5c2dAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ

So now I’m going to go back, and using Google’s button image, but not its code. Instead, I’ll just link the image directly to the calendar. I tested it by logging out of Google, logging in under a different address, and adding it to my new calendar. Seems to work, but I’ll check with the students…

A Second-Day Survey of Students

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Since I have planned a blog as a posting place, and in-class activities involving laptops, and since I am once again over-enrolled (40 students), I gave a survey to the 37 students in class today. Here’s what I learned.

Only half (18) have taken English 100 or 202, indicating many in the class are not prepared for college level writing. That was the bad news. The rest is good.

All but one answered correctly a quick question referring to Monday’s lecture.

The technology questions went well too:

  • 33 own or have access to a laptop they can bring to class
  • 30 use Facebook
  • 36 use email and text messaging
  • 37 use a cell phone
  • 34 have their cell phone with them in class every day
  • 34 or so check their email at least daily

This means the laptop projects should work, and I’ll consider using their phones as clickers. I’ll also consider asking them to use their phones to look things up, even though I tried that last semester with a student who had an iPhone, and he had no idea how to use it that way! I have already set up a Facebook group and linked it from the class website, but I have not yet mentioned it in class — I want to see what happens.

I also had one privacy question.  34 students were OK with having their real name appear on their posted homework, which is on a blog on the open web. Only three needed privacy. (I give this option because I have students who are being stalked, who have people under restraining orders who want to know where they are when, and nasty things like that — if they want privacy, I respect that!)

However, in a small test of Creepy Treehouse Effect, I also asked which of the above technology they like being used for class purposes, and most wanted to just use email.

Email, of course, is for old people. And, it seems, school!

Don’t attend or participate. Contribute!

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Today I went through my grading pages and everywhere changed the word “participation” to “contribution”.

At the half-way point and again at the end of the semester, I ask students to do a self-assessment. Both together are worth 20% of the class grade, and it’s here where I “grade” their discussion forum posts. In these self-assessments, some students admit that they’ve done little to help others, or haven’t posted much in the forum. A few critique my class, saying they shouldn’t have to participate in a forum, they don’t like posting, they don’t think what their colleagues post is helpful, blah blah blah.

Of course, my forums are no longer “discussion” or “reflection”. It isn’t enough anymore to just “participate” — students must add content to the collection, and their own interpretation of a portion of that content in the form of a historical thesis. The expectation that they help each other has been there, but it’s not explicit unless you reference the grading pages.

Studies have shown that this generation of students will need to be able to create things and work in groups, including in an online environment. They need experience at teamwork. But even without this sociological stuff, there’s the old adage that you get out of an experience what you put into it. What they put into my class can’t just be their own private work shared with me. That would be fine if I were a tutor at Oxford, but I’m at a community college with 200 students starting each semester. We must help each other, whether it’s trendy or not. We must create our own norms, feed each others’ minds.

I know some professors who mark a student absent if s/he’s sleeping in class. Aside from the arguments about sleeping in class (sometimes students need to, and I don’t wake them up or take offense), the idea is that if they aren’t awake they can’t listen. Listening isn’t enough.

So, students! What are you bringing to class that will make class better, a more vibrant learning environment? Being a good audience? As a professor, I have tired of planning moving and engaging scenes and acting them out, hoping for a good response. Who am I, Shakespeare? This is education, not a Restoration comedy. Coming to class prepared to watch by reading the play ahead of time is good, but in what way are you taking part?

The “Participation Assessment” is now a “Contribution Assessment”. The grading rubric now says “Contribution to the Class” as the column heading instead of “Participation”. A small change in language, yes, but I hope it will emphasize that I expect my students to contribute to the class rather than merely attend or simply participate.

Helping students get txt reminders

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I have often thought I’d like a system to txt students reminders of deadlines in online classes, but all the methods I’ve explored over the last half dozen years or so involved too much work on my part, collecting cell phone numbers and such. So I’m going to try this semester to let Google Calendar do the heavy lifting.

I put all my deadlines for each class into its own Google Calendar. This was relatively simple, since I could duplicate entries and move them easily. Since Google insists on both start and end times, I just made them within a minute: something due at midnight runs 11:59pm-12:00am, for example. It took me about 90 minutes to do three full classes.

I then followed the instructions at the Google Calendar page for letting people save all the events on a calendar. I wanted a button that students could click to load my calendar into theirs. Next to this button I put a link to instructions on how to get Google Calendar to send you txt message notifications. It looks like this, pasted into an HTML block in Moodle:


We’ll see if it works.

Notes from Sloan-C’s Emerging Techs

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Notes from Sloan-C’s Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, which I attended as a live virtual participant:

From Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 as a 21st-century LMS with Linda Wallace of Pepperdine: Idea of Google Apps as a mid-point between an LMS and a PLE was briefly mentioned but I think was a valuable perspective.

From Engaging online dialogue: The pedagogy of annotation-enhanced discussion forums with Cindy Xin of Simon Fraser University, Canada: need to try Marginalia in Moodle, which allows students to add comments and annotations to each other’s forum posts.

From eScholars: Encouraging the Use of Emerging Educational Technologies Through a Collaborative Faculty Development Program, the idea that everyone offering cool faculty development tracks gives stipends to faculty participants and are run by instructional designers instead of faculty. Very depressing.

From Enhancing Moodle to Engage Students; Powerful Teaching that Makes Moodle More Effective, a combination of tools embedded in Moodle for interaction, including free tools like VoiceThread and Xtranormal (and paid-to-adapt WizIQ, AuthorLive) in a great web page to demo these.

From How 2 Lrn W Ur iPod: Using a fully online Moodle course to teach students how to be better learners with technology with the brilliant Kevin Kelly of SFSU: the idea of an “online flex hybrid” where students can choose whether to come to on-site class and participate or view the class live or recorded online and participate asynchronously.

From MERLOT classic award winners on Brief Hybrid Workshops: University of North Carolina, support for the idea we are already developing at POT for faculty development of creating brief under-5-minute learning objects (oh, that term!) surrounded by support materials and synchronous or asynchronous community discussion for various topics. Excellent webpage resource as an example.

From Beyond Grades—Comprehensive Student Assessment Using Common Desktop Tools with Rebecca Peet of UCSC: the old-style workaround gradebook: using Microsoft Excel as a rubric-styled gradebook with a template to fill in the blanks, and Word’s Mail Merge to send individual grade reports to students via email.

Buzzwords and jargon were rampant! This bingo card would have been useful. Also I kept hearing turn key. But some jargon was helpful. Somewhere I picked up the concept/jargon of “iterative development” — I think we need to consider this perspective for both Blackboard and Moodle instead of just “buying” them.

From Educational Networking: Building Models for Social Networking in Education with Steve Hargadon: Social networking + LMS + live collaboration is his future model. Hargadon seemed somewhat enamored of Blackboard’s recent aquisition of Elluminate as fulfilling this model. I don’t like social networking tools (blogs, wikis) inside closed systems that disappear when the class is over — I think this undermines the broader learning goals of those tools. Instead of seeing social networking under an educational umbrella, I’m seeing education happening under a social networking umbrella. Let’s deal with that.

From Where’s My Stuff? Are your students content with your content? with Sherry Lindquist: techniques to control what students see. I agreed with this in terms of preventing confusion and having students feel overwhelmed. I did not agree in terms of controlling release of forum responses until a student has responded. If you have to do that, you’re writing a lousy prompt. Disconnected students will drop if forced to put themselves forward like that. Connected students will contact each other in Facebook. I’d rather see them learn!

My biggest disappointment was the fact that few (if any) emergent technologies were introduced (Voicethread is not at all new), and virtual participants had to rely on Twitter (hashtag #et4online) to participate in real time becauase Mediasite’s commenting was not really that synchronous. Also, many of the cool techniques were based on individualized activities and feedback impossible for me to implement with 200 students each semester.

Connections were great, though. My favorite co-participants included Kelvin Thompson, with whom I hope to be writing an article called “Linking Out and Widgeting In: Leveraging Your LMS with a Crowbar”.

I don’t feel dirty, but I would like an edupunk virtual conference to clear my palate…

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.

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.