Category: Online Teaching

My student evaluations analyzed, by me

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

I ask students to do a survey at the end of the semester — no extra credit for doing it, just a request for all four of my online classes. 85 students did the survey, though on a couple of questions a few less selected an answer.

Some surprises:

Dump the mp3 files?
For every weekly written lecture, I have audio of me reading it, with embedded Quicktime buttons on the web page, plus a download link for the whole mp3 file. I ask students whether they use the Quicktime buttons embedded in the lecture, download the mp3 file provided, or don’t use the audio at all. The amount of students who download the full mp3 file was far lower than in previous years (only 6%), and the amount using the embedded buttons much higher (62%). 32% rarely or never use the audio.

The mp3 option is time-consuming for me. Each lecture in each class is divided into sections, and each sections has its own audio file. To get the mp3, I have to convert the whole set of .mov files, then zip them all together, and post the zip file’s link. So every time I change one little thing in one little section, I have to go through all this after re-recording the .mov file. Perhaps it’s not necessary. Students used to do it so they could listen in their cars or on iPods. Maybe they don’t anymore?

They are reading my comments on their quizzes!
For the first time I asked whether they were reading the comments I put on the quizzes, not because doing this is time-consuming but because so many students seemed to make the same mistakes in essay after essay. Almost all the students read them, and only 2 out of 85 didn’t know the comments were there (I tell them how to access the comments in an announcement and email after each quiz).

They are also reading the sample essays.
While grading quiz essays, I copy and paste a few of the best into a file, which I then post (without students’ names) as sample essays. Because this is a separate link, and again, because many students continued with poor essays, I asked whether the samples were helpful. Only 11 of the 85 didn’t use them, and almost all the rest found them helpful. So I’ll keep doing that.

Not surprising:

They understand why they’re getting the grade they’re getting.
One of my most important questions tries to balance out their expectations with their performance. If I don’t have high marks on this one, there is a disconnect between grading and perceived achievement. Only 3 out of 85 students disagreed with the statement “I understand why I’m getting the grades I’m getting”.

There are still no good History of England textbooks.
My England class had a particularly high (50%) percentage of people not using the textbook extensively, and it was the only class where there were open comments on the textbook. England is impossible. There is only one true textbook (Roberts and Roberts, Prentice Hall) and it is two full volumes, for a two-semester course (mine is one semester). I am currently using Roy Strong’s The Story of Britain, but may have to switch to something, anything else.

They don’t want an e-book.
Given the preponderance of internet talk about e-books and open source texts, I had a hunch that students wanted to keep their old, boring, expensive printed text book. 58% want to keep that printed textbook. 21% would prefer an e-text, and only 14% want free stuff on the open web instead of a textbook. (Well, OK, this last was a little surprising!)

Good students do the survey.
By their own report, the overwhelming majority of students doing the survey were earning As (51%) or Bs (39%) in the class. I ask this (and a question about how much effort they put into the class) to determine the scholastic level and dedication of the students responding to the survey. I find this most useful!

And my favorite question:

This one is about instructor presence: “I felt that Lisa was really present and visible during this class”. 68% strongly agreed and 29% agreed. Only 4% didn’t think so.

Their comments:

Regarding the comments, I have instituted several changes in response. A few students noted that it was hard to find the primary sources during a quiz, because they have to go back to the forums to look for them. One comment suggested they be somehow linked from the quiz area, but it doesn’t look like I can do that in Moodle, so I’ve added a “Search Forums” box to the main page, and added instructions in the FAQ on using it, and opening another tab or window during a quiz.

Another comment was frustrated with the long, long forum. I use a nested format as the default, but students can change to view to flat or threaded view if they wish — it’s right at the top of each forum. I’ve also added this to the FAQ, with a screenshot.

Yet another complained about not being allowed to add their own sources, which I actually encouraged every week! Another note in the FAQ. (You’ll notice the FAQ has internal links, so I can point them from anywhere to one particular issue.)

I also noted they tended to rate the quality of interaction with other students — they recognized that as part of the design. However, there was no consensus about what I’d done. One student raved about getting to know his/her classmates so well, while another said s/he never really got to know the other students.

Some bemoaned the repetition of the pattern of posting sources, then writing historical theses. Yet in the forums themselves, I saw enthusiasm for the former, and deep improvement over time on the latter. I’m sorry if they find it repetitive. Another word for that is practice! 😉

I may regret this, but in the interest of openness, I’m sharing the whole spreadsheet of results, objective polling only (no comments). Since I’m not being formally evaluated this semester, the only person’s privacy being violated here is my own!

Student-created content and a big weird thang

Lisa M Lane 7 Comments

As a historian, it is my job to teach students about different kinds of sources. As part of my desire to have students DO more history, I asked students to form collections of primary sources in weekly discussion forums, then develop theses about them. I developed a whole new method this year to do that. In many ways it’s been totally cool (see this post), but now, at the end of the semester, there’s a big element of failure as I read the final exams.

Despite ongoing reminders that their colleagues are not primary sources, I continue to read many exams that cite other students’ posts instead of actual sources to support the thesis. I wrote about this almost every week in the forums, once I noticed it happening there.

There’s a big difference between using what Harry posted (a photograph of an H-bomb explosion) and what Harry said about it (“what a big boom!”). They are actually quoting each other as if they are sources themselves. I even had a student quote her own post.

I can’t tell whether this is just laziness, or total misunderstanding, or an extension of their overly-developed self-esteem, but I’ve never seen this before. When I asked them to “use the primary sources that have been posted in the forum”, it never occurred to me they’d do this. I begin to wonder about all this educational push toward student-created content, and what it’s led students to believe about that content. They seem to think that their writing is on the same level as that of a professional historian, worthy of citation.

I really loved the collections of sources they made, and I plan to add something more to the beginning of the class about distinguishing sources because I really don’t want to do away with this idea. But this problem is adding a whole other layer to the difficulty students already have distinguishing a primary source (something created at the time we’re studying) from a secondary source (an article or textbook about that timeframe).

Is this something constructivists deal with all the time?

Images and Textbooks

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

There have been many discussions in the last year, both on campus and online, about textbooks. We want to rent them, do away with them, reduce their price, donate them to charity. We are sick of new editions that are clearly to make money since the content hasn’t changed, and mad about our students not being willing to buy them.

Last week I was trying a cool exercise with my San Elijo class, the one we’ve done once before this semester with the few borrowed laptops and the few brought by students. (I took their photo with their permission, in an effort to convince the college to get us some netbooks for class.)

The first time, each group had to post a historical thesis and three images on their Group’s section of the Ning, then present to the class, showing the images, while we all peer evaluated their presentation.

This time, it was more extensive, because each thesis needed three topic sentences to support, and each of these needed three primary sources (some images, some text).

(It was a little odd to have them do this, knowing that soon the Ning will vanish, but what the heck, it was a transient exercise.)

Since they needed so many images, and had so few computers, I was happy to have them use their textbook images. They’d flip though their textbook, which was much easier than searching FOR images in a search engine, to get ideas for their thesis and support. They’d find an image they liked, and then tried to find a copy of the image online somewhere to post.

And here’s the kicker: they couldn’t. At first I thought it was just one image, by George Robertson, Nat-Y-Glo Iron Works (on the left — I had to scan it). The textbook says it’s from the National Museums & Galleries of Wales. They couldn’t find it online and neither could I. Then we gradually discovered we couldn’t find ANY of the images in their textbook online.

As I looked at who owned all these (museums, Corbis, Getty), I began to think it odd that there didn’t seem to be any images in the public domain. I began to suspect this was an additional reason for high textbook prices.

I went and researched one, an image of the Parthenon credited “William Katz/Photo Researchers”. I found their website of stock photography, and a similar image. I selected pricing for a similar-sized image in a published textbook, and the price was $280 (Editorial use on the inside of a single edition of a textbook.) I can see how this would add up. Why not use public domain images and make them available? Do students really need that particular photo of the Parthenon? No, I think they’d rather have it available online.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I’m thinking that the textbook companies, even with their ugly two-color editions, don’t really want to reduce the price of a text.

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.]

Back away from the ledge, please

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

I was working on the POT website. One of our wonderful facilitators, Laura Paciorek, had sent me some sample self-assessments she uses with her students. She had mentioned them at her Elluminate session “Connections in Online Classes” last Friday (the recording is here) and had been asked to share. So I went to the website to post them on the Handouts page.

It’s really a WordPress blog, so I went to upload the two pdf’s. It was very easy. Then I thought — wait a minute, this isn’t how I do things!

I put everything in a folder on the college’s server, a folder for all our Program for Online Teaching stuff. The website used to be a plain website. Then it was in Moodle. Everything was linked to the files in the web folder.

I tell everyone new to online teaching: don’t enter anything into the LMS you don’t have to! Keep it all in your own files, in your own folder, and link. Every button in Blackboard can be changed to show one of your pages. All you have to enter into an LMS are your quiz questions and discussion prompts, and even these should originate as plain text files you keep on your hard drive.

Why? because who knows whether that system, that package, will be available five years from now? or next year? What if you teach at two colleges mandating two different systems, and no one lets you export? what if you change your mind? what if your pedagogy takes a different turn? what if someone gives you freedom you didn’t have before? what if everyone went to the same restaurant on the same day and ordered blintzes? (They don’t, but I worry about these things…)

So what the heck was I doing uploading pdf files into WordPress? I must have been mad. I put them in the web folder, uploaded, and linked.

Whew, that was close…

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.

Student-created content: for the want of six laptops

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

I’ve fallen into a pattern this year in my on-site class. I usually lecture on Monday, right after they’ve read the chapter and documents and written a mini-essay with a thesis about the reading. Then on Wednesday, we do group work, which has evolved into each of six groups working together then doing short presentations: 45 minutes prep, 5 minutes per group presenting with everyone taking notes. I create essay questions for exams based on both lecture and their presentations, on the fly every two weeks.

These informal presentations work great for distilling information (if there’s a lot, like a whole chapter with lots of details) or, conversely, getting into details (if each group examines only one source in depth), whatever is needed at the time. I created a peer group evaluation form so they can get feedback on the presentations from everyone, so sometimes we do that.

So what’s missing? Images. Visuals. Audio. There is only one computer in the room, connected to a projector for presenting. Students can create words, ideas, but they can’t show us anything because there isn’t time for each group to create on one machine.

The skill we practice in class is always the same: create a thesis and support it with evidence. Without a way to put together any multimedia, everything is text. I can bring up text or images that I have collected for them to use, but that limits their choices to what I collect. Especially from the half-way point, where we begin moving toward more student-created theses and evidence after practicing for weeks, I’d like them to be able to access everything, or at least everything on the web, and show us what they’re presenting about.

We’d have to go to a lab to create anything, and the labs in the library only hold 24 max (my class max is 40, with 36 still enrolled now at the half-way point). The available lab has the layout in rows facing the front, with all the computers crammed into a small room. Groups can’t work together easily at all. The lab is trying to put each student at his/her own machine, which isn’t what I want anyway.

So today I contacted Media Services, because I’d heard we had a “laptop cart” that could be delivered to classrooms. Turns out that’s not exactly correct. There are apparently three laptops with lousy batteries that would need to be plugged in to the few outlets in the room, and a few more that could be rounded up, but some are stored in a classroom that’s booked all day, so we can’t be spontaneous about using them (this is despite the fact that no one, either in that room or elsewhere, uses them). The cart is actually more like a station that is hard to actually move. Plus Microsoft updates have to been done every week if the laptops are actually used. If they rounded up six machines, there is no cabinet in my room in which to secure them, so they can’t stay there. We’d rather have old things securely locked up and not used, then insecure and used for learning. There be metaphors here.

So, in a flash of inspiration, I inquired about departmental or instructional funds to buy six netbooks, since we just need them for web work. I have six groups of students. My idea was to have them put what they find onto one of the many web 2.0 sites, like Zoho show or something, then present. But there’s no money, I’m told, despite the fact that money is being spent elsewhere (interestingly enough, the example I was given was an expenditure on cabinetry to lock up another discipline’s stuff). And there’s the feeling that the whole laptop experiment, where the few laptops were purchased years ago but no one used them, was a bust, so why bother? The locked up computers are seen as a failure. Plus, years ago the office computers were all put on a four-year replacement cycle, but no one did that with classroom computers, so everything outdates. That explains both why my classroom’s poor little Mac Mini struggles to run 10.5 and keeps having crises, and why the available [sic] laptops are such crap.

I will ask my students whether some could bring their laptops to class to use in groups, but I’ve seen the response to that kind of idea. Some simply don’t want to use their personal technology for school (I recall the shocked look I got earlier this semester when I suggested a student use his iPhone to look up something). Many don’t want others touching their computer. This isn’t just “creepy treehouse” stuff, where they don’t want me in their electronic world — it’s how they assert control over their own consumer products, which are exclusively for their pleasure, not work or school. I get that, and know they’d be much more cooperative and creative with school-owned laptops.

Good pedagogical idea, but not possible for the want of six laptops. I’m sure I’ll figure out a way, though the currrent solution seems to involve extension cords and cramming groups of desks near outlets. But here’s the point. The tech support at my college is very, very good. We have presentation computers in every classroom, even if they are old, and the staff is outstanding. How can new pedagogies develop at places that have less than I do if I can’t even do this? How can real change occur when the baby steps are made difficult for faculty? How can we move toward student-created content inside the classroom when the teacher-presentation model is being reinforced continually? It makes online education seem like an answer to more than cost factors and personal scheduling issues.

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…

Chef as metaphor

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Last year, as part of the huge Connectivism course, we were asked to consider various metaphors for the role of the instructor in this new internet-influenced world of learning by association (and with ones associates).

The metaphor of curator, which George Siemens used, seemed to me the best at portraying the new paradigm. At the time, I suggested the role of Organic Gardener or Wizard to be apt also.

But this week, after preparing Prezis and recordings and providing worksheets for translating lecture material into a handy chart of political shifts during the French Revolution, many students did very poorly on the quiz. The brighter students easily saw that I had prepared them thoroughly for the exam. Others wandered around the essay question, not realizing it reflected what we had done together in class. We had spent an hour with me putting the events of the French Revolution within a framework of conservative/liberal/radical politics, and many essays didn’t use any of these words.

I was not using open, connectivist learning, but rather classic lecture and a classic essay question. Nothing should have been in the least surprising. It occurred to me that I had cooked the meal, laid the table, and some had simply refused to eat. It should have been comfort food, what they were used to, but seemed somehow exotic.

So my new analogy is that of chef. I am a master of the ingredients of history. I can combine them into multiple complex formulas to please the most discriminating palate. I do not like being treated like a mere cook, whose role it is to simply serve up the quick info and then expect quick consumption. Our current model of student as customer has, of course, encouraged the White Castle burger (or In ‘n’ Out if you prefer) approach. The items on the menu are assumed to be limited, and to cater to pedestrian tastes, familiar to all.

I served up a wholesome meal, a chronology of the French Revolution with a pleasing side dish of political philosophy. They picked at it, and would probably have preferred macaroni and cheese.

I suppose if I taught at a university, it would be like being a gourmet chef, the kind that gets his name in the newspapers. People come to that chef’s restaurant to eat what he cooks, because he is an expert. Only those who can afford it, those who at least think they have discriminating taste even if they don’t, would visit. At an open access community college, however, I get a much broader spectrum of clientele. I do not mean this in a socio-economic sense, but rather in an intellectual sense. I have students who are there to get into a good university and already come to me with intellectual skills, ready to hone them into historical skills during my class. They ask what’s fresh today, order on my recommendation, use their napkin, and tip properly. But I also have those who casually made it through high school, and who think this is “high school with ashtrays”, and who are very much enjoying the fact that unlike in the cafeteria of secondary education, where they had to sit at a certain table for 45 minutes, they can now refuse to eat at all. A number are there only to stay on daddy’s health insurance, and will happily take a D. They clean their nails at the table, order too many drinks, and make fun of the French names on the menu. They expect a TV chef, that I’ll juggle knives or get all choked up if the judges don’t like me.

How do I serve them, as society assumes I am supposed to do? Open education means opportunity for all, and everyone deserves a chance to succeed, so all must understand the menu, and be able to digest what I’m offering. At our Adventures in Online Pedagogy session in January, my colleague Jim asked the attendees to move to the corner of the room representing their pedagogical comfort zone: instructivist, constructivist, or connectivist. It was assumed that I would be the only one in the connectivist corner. I really couldn’t go there yet. I’m still part instructivist and part constructivist, as my forum design demonstrates. I still think I need to serve them something, and that I’m the best person to decide what the something is. But the fact is, I was trained as a chef, not a short order cook. I can’t do Adam and Eve on a Raft, wreck ’em. My understanding is that I was hired to make the decisions in the kitchen, yet the pressure seems instead to make sure that everyone eats. If I have a high drop rate, I must be doing something wrong. If too many students get below a C, it’s seen as my fault. They don’t like the food, I must be cooking the wrong things.

What I would like to do is serve a connectivist buffet, and let them make their own plate. But I worry that they will not make good food choices. Some will go for the sugar, having been given their own choice for the first time since high school, selecting sensationalist tidbits from the History Channel. The only ones who will create a nutritious plate will be those in the habit of doing so, or who are bright enough to understand the digestive consequences of an unbalanced meal. These are the A students, the ones who could have cooked a decent meal for themselves anyway.

I just wonder whether the buffet, or connectivist approach, would make this better or worse. Would providing a huge selection of choices lead to real learning? or would they just get too many carbs?

What can I do for open education?

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Hey professor

I was just wondering if there was any way i could download the content of this class to my computer. I really enjoy the lectures and all the info and active links and there are a lot of posts that i would like to go back and read again. If there is an easy way to get it all that would be really cool. I also was wondering if it is possible to go back and do the same for previous semesters? Well if there is a way just let me know thanks for an awesome class.

— Patrick

OMG Patrick, I thought (I do sometimes think in SMS), here I read all this stuff about open education and I don’t even have a clear way for you to get to the material afterward?

It’s not that my classes are open — they’re not. They’re closed in several ways. They are full of enrolled students, so many (40 per class) that I cannot keep up, so they’re seriously closed. We’re a week into the semester, so you can’t join us — the class is closed. The classes are in Moodle, a learning management system and thus a closed silo, a walled garden, a protected “course” that provides a safe classroom-style space but makes visible lifelong learning require links out to the web and multiple passwords.

But my lectures are on the open web, and always have been. Not by design — when I started constructing them there was no place to put them except the open web. Or a passworded folder. I asked the MCC computer folks back in 1998 to make me folders called “pw” for each of my classes, but didn’t do much else. Since then, I link out to the lectures from whatever system I’m in or syllabus web page I’m on. I revise these lectures continually and upload them to space on a hosted site, and they’re just there, available by URL. But in my online classes in Moodle, because they’re linked out, one might not wish to track all those URLs. They aren’t all on one page, but rather grouped with the discussions and quizzes in each week’s block.

Since the forums are locked inside Moodle, and the class is made invisible (I don’t delete them) after the semester is over, those would be much harder to get to later on. In fact, even if I left them open, I plan to move away from my private Moodlerooms account soon now that they’ve raised the price from $500 to $1500 a year, so the content might not be there later anyway. Even if we used a Ning or Facebook instead of a CMS, who’s to say that will be there ten years from now? The open web spaces we construct things in won’t even be there (she thinks as she spends hours late at night constructing a Prezi).

But the lecture I can do. My only hesistation is that I link and embed some copyrighted material. So if a movie studio sends me a cease and desist letter, I’ll have to do some editing. But isn’t it worth it to have a place where students can at least access my lectures later on? Even if they’re a bit different? Should I archive the old ones?

Anyway, I sat right down and made a webpage of all the lectures from all my classes, and am encouraging other instructors (as has Patrick) to do the same. I may not be ready to walk the whole walk of open education, but I can at least do that. And let anyone come in who wants to for their own enrichment — I have my first unofficial “auditor” attending a class this semester. I gotta think hard about the rest….

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!

Learned in the first few weeks

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

This has been a semester for learning already, after only two weeks!

First, I tried Prezi for supplementing my lecture on the second day of class at San Elijo campus. It worked really well, even though I had to run around and beg a mouse with a scrollwheel from the tech folks before class. Prezi’s zoom feature is just impossible without one, and with Prezi zooming is the whole point.

The students enjoyed the presentation mode so much they asked to be able to access the Prezi after class, so I made it public (Prezi calls this “published”), but with some trepidation. I cite all my sources, but still…. and the new UCLA case has me kind freaked. I went aherad and made it public. Then I sat down to work on the next lecture.

History, of course, is a flow, and I realized it would be much better conceptually to add to the first Prezi presentation instead of making a second one. I did that, and went to class this week. But when I tried to use the Prezi, the browser kept crashing. I had to improvise quickly, creating a visual assignment out of the textbook because the technology wasn’t working (I tell all faculty “have a backup plan!”, but do I do that? NO). They did good work, but it wasn’t what I’d wanted to do, especially having spent 2.5 hours adding to the Prezi and figuring out how to get audio into it. Pieces of music by Handel, Bach and Mozart came to nothing! I posted my agony in Twitter, and Jim Julius at SDSU came to my rescue, telling me to download the Prezi and use the downloaded version as the primary presentation. Turns out Prezi downloads little players when you do that, so now I can link it for students without making it public too. Don’t you love social networking????

Another interesting thing that happened relates to enrollment.  Well before the semester started, I had students begging to get into classes, as we all did since so many colleges have had to cut back their offerings. MiraCosta has not, both because we’re on a different funding structure than other colleges in California, and because our Board has wisely been willing to tap into the college’s reserves (stashed for years with great wisdom and foresight, to my way of thinking, given the spendthrift habits of this state during times of surplus) to keep classes open.

But I noticed that few students were dropping my classes, so students from my wait list couldn’t get in. At the same time, when I exchanged emails with those wait list students, a few would write back with, “that’s OK, I was able to get into another instructor’s class”. I wrote to this instructor and asked how was he doing it, getting students to drop? scaring them to death? and if so, how could I do it too? I just knew that many of the enrolled students wouldn’t be able to handle the load, but didn’t have the sense to drop early.

Finally, I asked one of the students who’d gotten into the other instructor’s section, just sort of musing by email, “I wonder why my students are being so ‘sticky’, why they aren’t dropping?” and she wrote back, “I know why, for the same reason I was interested in your class, Ratemyprofessfor.com :)”.  Oooohhh. A few years ago I began inviting students at the end of the semester to put a critique at that site as well as in my evaluation forms. Apparently it’s bringing me some business!

Are students breaking the Bb habit?

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Every semester, students go to Blackboard looking for my class. Of course, my class is not in Blackboard. If you’re one of my online students, it’s in Moodle. Not the college’s Moodle, but my Moodle. If you’re at San Elijo, the class is in a Ning (well, and in the classroom).

Nevertheless, all of us deviants have a Bb class assigned to us, even if it’s not visible to students. We are supposed to create links from there to where we want students to go, acknowledging that students use Bb like a portal. When I chaired the technology committee, I agreed this was a good idea, mostly because I was doing it anyway, so now we’re all supposed to do it.

So every semester, I erase all the Bb menu buttons so students won’t get confused — they can only click on my info page, and it opens in a new window to eject them from Bb.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a number of students always enter their class through Blackboard — they are unaware that the class is actually somewhere else. As I’ve commented elsewhere, even if they know it’s another site, they still call any class website “Blackboard” or “the blackboard”.

Well, this semester I forgot to make the Blackboard shells I’d set up available to students. It was an honest mistake. I did set them up, which takes some time, so obviously I meant to do it. I thought I had done it.

But yesterday I got an email from a student. You see, I have huge wait lists of people wanting to get in to very full classes. So if a student doesn’t “show up” at the site on the first day, I email them. Of course, I have already emailed all students via our enrollment system the week before, pointing them to the right place. This student didn’t get that email, but today got the one where I said I’d have to drop him if he didn’t show.

He wrote me that he went to Blackboard, but the class wasn’t there, so he asked at “registration” and they said wait, it will open. So it wasn’t fair of me to drop him.

Bad on so many levels! Totally understandable that it wouldn’t occur to him the class might be elsewhere, but he asked at “registration”. He obviously hadn’t gone anywhere else at the college’s website — we have many pages for the online class information, all of which are linked properly to my classes. We have a call-in Student Helpdesk. But all he had was my second email, which he happened to discover on the third day of class.

Here’s the strange thing. He was the only one. I swear, I had received only two other emails from students who couldn’t find my class, and that was because they had gone to the college’s Moodle installation instead of mine. This is out of 160 online students!

In other words, 99.38% of students found their class without using Blackboard. Despite this student’s brief distress (don’t worry — I tell them I’m dropping them but I always wait awhile so long as it doesn’t affect their record — he’s fine), that stat is amazing to me. It means they did use the website, or did check their email, or didn’t make assumptions, or just found their way like they would on campus when looking for their classroom. Only one other student had even mentioned the course not being in Blackboard.

There is hope.

A Rubric Relationship

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

I often talk about my relationship with technologies as if they were people. For example, in 2007 (!) I said my CMS needed to start taking out the trash if I was going to keep it around. Well, here’s another one — it’s about rubrics.

When the big fuss was being made about rubrics a number of years ago, I was skeptical. But I like anything that makes teaching more transparent (yes, I really will get to that post someday!). So I developed a rubric, and it is the heart of my students’ self-assessments of their work and participation. This morning, for example, I will receive from my on-site class their physical portfolios, where they suggest their grades for participation and work quality based on this rubric.

I have also studied excellent rubrics written by others, such as my brilliant colleague Louisa Moon, and use them myself to assure satisfactory grade progress in courses I’ve taken.

Rubrics are great, right? They let the student see exactly how the instructor is going to grade their work. The instructor has created the rubric based on how s/he really grades, what is actually sought, so the grading appears to be impartial and fair even though the qualities in it are subjective. It’s a great balance.

But here’s the rub of rubrics. They break down the grading process into little segments, and prevents a viewing of the whole.

A number of years ago, the wonderful Megill brothers (David and Don) taught me that no matter what, a grade is subjective. There is no such thing as “objective questions” or an objective grade. Grading is always subjective because it is always based on what the teacher wants.

I can try to list what I want, and give each item a point count. But what if a student does a superior job on one aspect, and not so well on another?

An example: let’s say I break down grading an essay into 4 points max for a solid thesis, 4 points for writing style, and 4 points for content development. The students created a thesis that should be published by Harvard University Press and turned into a book. I give him 4 points for that, but the writing’s kinda whatever and the content development not so hot considering how great a thesis it is. Total is thus 10 out of 12. I want to give him a 12 and write “OMG go back and develop this thesis and get the thing published!”

There isn’t room for this, even if I add an “overall quality” category or something, because then it applies to everyone. I have to break my own rubric.

When it comes to final grades, I do this naturally. My rules state that I reserve the right to reduce the grade due to:

instructor’s evaluation of overall learning, within one letter grade of total points earned. For example, your points could add up to a B, but if your overall work was not at the B level (see rubric, above), I could lower the grade to a C.

I also use this rule to boost a total up. After all, learning is about progression. If a student got lousy grades early in the semester, but improved as the course got more complex and involved, I want the final grade to show that progress, so I bump up a number of grades at the end of the semester. An “improvement” category wouldn’t make sense, except in an individual context.

That individual context is undermined by rubrics. I don’t grade on a curve, but rather try to grade each students’ work according to both a standard and individual progress.

And I think we all do this to a certain extent. Thus my relationship to the rubric has become fraught with suspicion. Is my rubric really doing the job I set it out to do? or is it sneaking around on me, limiting my options?

Blackboard as Kleenex

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

In recent conversations with Mike Bogle, I’ve stumbled on the idea that a lot of students, and online teaching novices, are using the word “Blackboard” when what they mean is “web learning stuff”.

It’s become like Kleenex, at one time the top brand of facial tissue in the U.S. People say “hand me a Kleenex” instead of “hand me a tissue”. The brand has become synonymous with the generic item.

My evidence is that students often say things like “I posted in the Blackboard”, when my class is actually located in Ning or Moodle. I find it interesting that they know what “posted” means, but not where they’ve posted. It’s all just the web, a Narnia that exists somewhere behind their computer screen. If their other teachers have referred to their course being in Blackboard, that must be where the online courses live, back there behind the fur coats amd the ads for enhancing male potency.

I’m sure this would thrill Blackboard, though it annoys the hell out of me, and folks like Mike, a leader in applying technology to the problems of pedagogy, who’s being called “the Blackboard guy”. I frequently have novice faculty approach me and tell me they’re getting into online teaching, so they’re going to take a Blackboard workshop, and where do they sign up for one?

I am always shocked no matter how often this occurs. I never know where to start. Do I first mention that they need to decide what they want to accomplish, then look at technology? point out there are many other systems (and non-systems) they can use? point out that POT doesn’t do “training” but we are delighted to help with their pedagogical needs?

Instead, I think I should try to figure out what they mean by “Blackboard”. Then I’ll probably need a Kleenex.

Ramblings on assessments that work and assumptions that don’t

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

At this time of the semester, I am grading Participation Assessments. I do this twice each semester, asking the students to evaluate their own participation in the course as compared to a rubric.

Clip art licensed from the
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At the end of the first eight weeks, when they do this for the first time, there are often revelations. Students are grateful I gave the assignment, because now they know they aren’t meeting expectations. Many promise to do better.

I learn from this that the assessment is important, because it makes them look at the Grading Policies page, where the rubric is. That page has been “required” reading since the beginning of the class. There were questions from it on the Tech Check/Syllabus Quiz, which is the first thing due in the class. And yet most have forgotten it, or never read it, or didn’t think it applied to them, etc. till the assessment.

What’s remarkable is that occasionally, the assessment at the end of the year also prompts discovery, or in this case, makes me aware there hasn’t been any.

My ending Participation Assessment says:

After carefully examining the grading rubric, your logs, and forum posts for the second half of the semester, consider in what ways have you improved or reduced your participation from the half-way point. Please briefly explain:
1. how may points you received on the first Participation Assessment,
2. how many you think you should have for this half, and
3. why.

One student wrote:

“I’ve actually probably participated less since the class begun. I just try to learn the information that is presented along with information in my book and take the tests and get the best grade possible. I’ve always not really understood the class discussions, since i can usually do the test with out them and i am really busy. I don’t think i should get to many points in the participation section! I’ll try to get by and do my with the tests.”

This student didn’t have a single discussion post since the first evaluation, and seemed unaware that the discussions aren’t just chatting — they constitute the bulk of writing for the class. I tell them this, of course, but I say it in the forums! And there’s no evidence here that he looked at the rubric at all.

I figure the Grading Policies page isn’t the only page not being seen by some. I know by looking at logs that many skip the Study Guides (and therefore don’t realize they contain all the multiple choice questions that will be on the forthcoming quiz). Or they don’t bother with the lecture. They read the book, and take the tests.

In terms of course design, I don’t consider the discussion 20% of the course, just 20% of the grade. It’s more like half the class, because it’s the processing and sharing of the knowledge learned via presentation and reading. It’s the heart, not a side activity. It’s lower stakes (not 50% of the grade)  because I want the students to feel free to explore. I assume they’re looking at the grading, and figuring where to spend their time for maximum grade impact. But I see increasingly that they don’t do that.

Rather, they make assumptions:

  • Anything called a test or quiz is important.
  • Anything called discussion you can miss.
  • The textbook is the heart of the class and should be read carefully.
  • Anything called an assessment could go one way or another.
  • If it’s online, it’s self-paced and you don’t need to “show up”.
  • All online classes are in Blackboard.

They have to discover that it’s not that way, but to discover one has to explore. As I see all these wonderful ideas to get students to explore (using collaborative or connectivist methods) they have to actually peruse the class website, understand the rules and the process. My class isn’t that much different from a traditional class, yet I have a very non-traditional element in the way I use discussion and participation assessments (where they get to assess their own learning). If students can’t even accept this, what chance do more radical methods have?

I know, I have heard that one has to throw out the whole thing (university, grading, teacher-directed anything) for it to work. But I refuse to believe this. If I do that, I will spend the entire class with teacher-directed instruction on how to do the class! Once I created an (on-site) honors section where all we did was write one research paper, meeting an hour a week throughout the semester. Just one paper. Instead of talking history and ideas during our hour-long sessions, I ended up having to instruct them on how to write a paper. Even with a list to guide them, they did not know how to do basic college English 101 things, like make an outline, do basic research, develop a thesis. Of the 12 who started the section, only 3 finished. Their assumption? That I would lecture on history for the 16 hours, and they’d memorize it. My radical method was great for 3 students. That doesn’t hack it in my job.

This means that designing an online class is not just an exercise in transferring pedagogy, or plugging things in. It is an awareness that the exact same difficulties that haunt us in on-site classes are not magically solved online. These challenges include students not attending class, not reading the syllabus, not understanding when they ask a question and it is answered, not asking questions when they need to, missing tests, having low reading ability, being inexperienced at processing basic information, and not being aware of cues given to help them.

Sometimes we focus so hard on the “online” aspect of the class that we forget these problems exist, or think they are replaced by scary tech problems instead. The scary tech problem comes down to one: if the only way the student will understand what’s necessary is to be talked to into his face, then he will not understand. If he couldn’t understand anyway, no matter how many different ways it’s explained, then that’s the way it is. Whether it’s online or on-site, all we can do is provide resources and repeatedly remind the students that those resources (the instructor, the rules posted or handed out, the entire internet, that site or handout about plagiarism) are there for them.  We can try to counter assumptions, but we cannot eliminate all obstacles.

Teaching and changing ones mind

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

“If you never change your mind, why have one?”
— Edward de Bono

We are, as teachers, in the business of changing minds. Despite this, we are often reluctant to change our own.

Over the years, I’ve adopted a number of policies, many of them draconian. When I was a new teacher, these were designed to keep students from walking all over me, since I was young and inexperienced. I remember being so frustrated with students being late to class that I locked the door one night ten minutes into class. That one showed up on an evaluation.

I have since changed my mind, on that and a number of other issues:

  • I ignore lateness for the most part, though if it’s excessive I give a hearty, cheery, pointed hello to the individual as s/he comes in.
  • I don’t care if their cell phone rings during class — heck, mine might. Most of my students think they’re fitting school into their lives, rather than the other way around. I just ask them to go outside if they need to take the call.
  • I have a lot of kinesthetic learners, and I am fine if they leave the room and return during class. I just ask that they don’t treat me like a TV — if I’m talking to the class, we should adapt the “blocking” to not cross in front of each other.
  • If a student falls asleep in class, I ignore that and catch the student as s/he leaves with a concerned comment, asking if they’re OK.
  • If students ask about a policy or rule I haven’t created yet, I ask them what they think and we do it together. After all, if it were that important to me, I would have the rule set already.
  • I don’t ask for a doctor’s note, nor do I distinguish excused from unexcused absences. I figure that’s why I teach college instead of lower grades. Whether they miss class because the surf’s up or because they were in the hospital, the result is the same. They missed class and need to consult the policy on that (no makeups, half credit max for what was missed).
  • I tell them why I’ve designed things the way I have (to increase skills from factual to analytical), why I want homework done every week (practice), why it has to be typed (others in the group have to be able to read it), why I don’t like what the authors of their book did in this chapter, etc. [I’ll blog more late on this “transparent pedagogy”.]
  • I do not spend extensive office hours listening to them talk about their abusive families, their nasty job, their medical diagnosis, the tough life they’ve had — as I said to a colleague, they are here in college to overcome these things, not wallow in them. I’m there to show them what to focus on and make recommendations for how to focus on my class if their life challenges allow it.
  • I apologize when I screw up, whether it’s a wrong date on the syllabus or a bad log-in procedure on the website.
  • I never try to be their friend, their mother, their parole officer, or their boss. I am there to provide an environment, resources and an approach in which they can learn history. Whether they choose to take advantage of it is up to them.

The result is that I haven’t had a student “discipline” problem in many years now. I recently realized in talking with an associate (who was having problems with her class) that I have a whole different perspective now. I set a few broad rules for the class that I expect everyone to follow, but I am open to individual exceptions at all times. I don’t tell the students this. They find out when they come to me, person to person (and online), with a problem. I am grateful they want to be responsible for their work, and they are grateful for my flexibility.

I did not set out to create an environment of mutual respect, but just to be myself and relax a bit, so we could focus on history. I won’t compromise on the quality of their work, the skills I want them to learn, or the progress I want them to make. But I have indeed changed my mind about controlling the setting through extensive rule-making that is designed, really, to assert my own authority. I already have authority. It’s given to me by the situation of teacher and learner, and by my own confidence in myself and my work.

“Training” faculty to teach online

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

At a professional development meeting last year, I found myself objecting to the word “training” to describe what the Program for Online Teaching offers to our instructors.

dog jumping through hoop
Image from SkycaptainTwo at Flickr

I was recently made aware that we may need to justify our “training” of online faculty for accreditation reports. Occasionally, I hear that we should have a program for “training faculty to teach online”. Everyone who teaches online, goes the argument, should be required to complete such a program. Other colleges offer training, at least through @ONE group, or have required workshops. Do we?

Note first that we have no “training” for on-site faculty, those who work in the classroom, with or without supplemental electronic technology. Something is perceived to be very different with teaching online, despite the fact that the course description, transfer requirements, materials, standards, student learning outcomes and everything else are identical regardless of “delivery format”.

And we need to define the word “training”, since two areas are often combined which shouldn’t be.

Technical training means teaching the use of the technology. Unfortunately, doing so is often used as a substitute for the development of an instructor’s online pedagogy, which should come first. Many other programs drill the technology and have faculty fit their pedagogy to it, as opposed to the other way around. The result is cookie-cutter courses and little innovation, plus an unhealthy reliance on expensive, enterprise-based CMSs like Blackboard.

Such training may not even be needed if the instructor knows the web, and those who do spend much time online tend to find training “requirements” intolerable (I know I do). Such training is commonly requested by faculty themselves on a “just in time”, need-to-know basis, from technical staff. It should never, ever be required. In the case of POT, we supplement the college’s technical training with faculty-led workshops on new technologies we know work for teaching, but which wouldn’t be on anyone’s “training” radar because they are not commercial systems. It would be bizarre to require it.

The other area I’ll call “training in teaching online“. Some colleges have a workshop or two in this, often called “Introduction to Online Teaching”, usually as a single offering among multiple workshops on how to use Blackboard. Sometimes such intro workshops are taught by faculty, but usually by those who are not experts in online pedagogy (or those who say they are experts but only teach about teaching, having PhDs in Education). POT, instead, uses experts in pedagogy (active professors in the disciplines) to teach about online pedagogy.

I don’t like to call this “training” — though some do. What is it? Teaching? Collaborating? Learning? Let’s try “preparation” or, I know, even better: “professional development”.

Such professional development for effective online teaching should be faculty-led. Technical training in commercial systems should be provided by technicians as needed. Online teaching standards, curriculum, etc. should be determined by departments and Senate, the same as they are for on-site classes — they are, after all, the same courses.

teacher-point-color
Clip art licensed from the Clip Art
Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

So how do we know that our online teachers are doing a good job? How do we know if they need “training”? The same way we know this about our classroom teachers, of course.  At our college, the hiring committee, then the Tenure Review Committee, determines the need for any additional professional development or skills acquisition as part of the evaluation process. Departments set standards for the teaching of the discipline, and department chairs and administrators evaluate faculty work.

Unfortunately, these colleagues and administrators, those doing the evaluating, are often uncomfortable with online teaching. I know any number of them, people I respect, who really don’t think teaching a class online is “real”, that it involves real learning or real teaching. Perhaps they are the ones who need to be “trained” in online pedagogies, since they are having trouble determing standards for online. In almost all cases, basic pedagogy (such as Chickering and Ehrman’s seven priniciples for good practice in undergrad ed from 1987) apply the same to online as on-site classes [see the TLT interpretation (1996) and this fabulous white paper from Virginia Commonwealth University (2009) about which I’ll write more anon]. The weakness is one of understanding on the part of colleagues and administrators, and, in some cases, lack of meta-cognitive pedagogy (whether online or on-site) among faculty.

The misconceptions about the validity of online teaching are only encouraged by using the word “training”. It implies a false proposition: that instructors need to learn the tools first, and that once they have done so they will develop good online classes. Neither of these is true. Instead, instructors should be encouraged to examine their pedagogy as they begin to teach online, and be provided with extensive technical support as they develop courses based on their chosen pedagogy. And powers-that-be (accrediting agencies, Chancellor’s Offices, and our own colleagues) should be aware that the need is for creating a good environment for encouraging such practices, instead of certifying “training in teaching online”.

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”?

Discussion Goodness

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

So much cool stuff is going on right now in my asynchronous discussions, I simply must report! If you follow me, you know I worked this summer to redesign my discussions because I was not pleased with them: they were too text heavy, didn’t allow enough student independence, and didn’t emphasize practice in creating a historical thesis.

Discussion Design

What I’m doing is emphasizing the collection of primary sources during the first part of the week, then the construction of a thesis based on those sources, plus critique and summary at the end of the week.

I start with a visual prompt and instructions that tell them they should respond to it with either a comment or their own piece of evidence. I have linked to the FAQ that has instructions on how to insert an image, video or audio clip into the forum. They need to connect their source to the unit, and post their source between Sunday (the start of our week) and Wednesday midnight.

On Thursday I come in, and create a “Take discussion from here, please” post that presents the best theses from the previous week, mentions the evidence they’ve presented, and creates tasks for the last part of the week, depending on what day they happen to sign in:

This is working very well — my History of England class created a first week’s forum that looked like the art gallery I had tried to get them to create when I used the glossary:

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

And the result is the creation of theses based on the evidence they have submitted, a little critique and revision, and a summary of the week’s discussion for those who like to come at the end anyway.

An Occasional Survey

I am also using a quick survey occasionally to check something. For example, I asked about the contribution of Roman culture to English history:

My interpretation in lecture was that Roman occupation had contributed only things that were not long-lasting; this let me know how the students interpreted the unit.

Emoticonism

I normally only use smiley faces and winks as emoticons in communicating with students. But last week, I had asked a couple of students to please go back to their evidence and cite it so we could see where it came from. They didn’t. I thought maybe it was not obvious in my post that I wanted them to — maybe they didn’t see it.

So I’m going to start using emoticons as symbols when I comment. Instead of writing “NOTE” or using bold or red text to highlight, I use a “thoughtful” emoticon:

Catches the eye, I think.

A Space for Learning (or The Value of Doing Things Half-Assed)

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

This post’s inspirations: George Siemens’ post Change That Prevents Real Change and the EdTech Posse podcast 5.6 from June (with Howard Rheingold), plus the fact that my colleague Jim Sullivan, our POT expert at blogging with students, is now using a Ning for his class.

George Siemens was concerned that online textbooks weren’t going far enough. His target was Flat World Knowledge, which offers textbooks in a restricted online format for free, and charges for printing or audio. This “tweaks the existing model of textbooks just enough to disrupt publishers, but not enough to disrupt the industry as a whole.” What ought to happen, Siemens argues, is change for the sake of principle rather than convenience, change that is more visionary. Ultimately he acknowledges arrangements like FWK’s as marking “[s]taged or transitional change”.

I now consider myself, having taken Siemens’ and Downes’ first online Connectivism course (which I blogged in great detail) and reading extensively, to be pretty familiar with the visionary goal of open, connected learning. I certainly use it myself everyday, as a learner. But I have had less success adapting it to teaching. Students resist for many of the reasons discussed in the EdTech Posse podcast, including their K-12 “training”, their desire for a more dictatorial class structure, the feeling they aren’t getting their money’s worth, the belief that the teacher isn’t really teaching, a marked absence of expected skills (bookmarking, RSS feeds), etc.

I’ve put this all together into a moderate position.

[If you know me, you may not think of me as moderate about anything. I eat chocolate to excess, get very passionate about things, and in the U.S. I am a political radical. Of course, in Europe, where they have real political parties, and in the CCK08 course itself, I am clearly in favor of moderation. Also as a historian: if one source says this, and another says the opposite, the truth is likely in between. I find myself these days, in the middle of my life, spending a lot of time defending the middle.]

Adding some online elements to a regular class is like creating those free online textbooks where you have to pay to have it in a traditional format. It’s a half-assed approach. I’ve done it continually with my classes (except for the one semester of History 101 which ended with only 40% of students still enrolled). It’s what most of our faculty do, and it is for principled reasons — to expand students’ horizons and take advantage of the wealth of information and tools available now via the internet.

In the face of all the wonderful, extraordinary thinking about open education (including this recent conference) I should be embarrassed to say that 80% of my classes still use a closed system, a CMS (course management system) — currently it’s Moodle. There are many arguments against these “closed silos” (a term coined by Brian Lamb and Michelle Lamberson). I’ve used most of them myself to argue for cobbling together ones own system. I’ve written articles on how to tame a CMS, get away from a CMS, subvert your CMS. And yet, I’m still using a CMS. Why?

Because sometimes half-assed is good.

The reasons I’ve always presented for why I use a CMS (copyrighted material behind a password a la the TEACH Act, and a gradebook integrated with assignments) may be only half the story. The other half, I think now, involves what currently concerns Howard Rheingold about student attention. (Here is his Attention 101 mini-lecture, where he explains his rules in class — how laptops may be used, etc.). Some instructors try to limit laptop use in an on-site class, because students spend their time doing things other than paying attention to the class. (I recall that I once saw a student watching skateboarding videos on YouTube instead of listening to the lecture I was evaluating.) I am aware of myself checking email and doing other things during meetings and conference presentations. Last year I told students with laptops they had to take notes and post them. I wasn’t comfortable with that. During the EdTech Posse podcast, Rheingold recalled how he watched over a student’s shoulder one time as the student used the internet to check email and do other things during a lecture. But he also Googled terms that came up in the talk, and bookmarked pertinent items.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by Koshyk

I now think that in an online class, this is what a closed system provides: FOCUS. Artificial, controlled focus with only a half-assed nod to open education.

Perhaps just a “class homepage” (like I’m using in my on-site History 103 class this semester) does something similar, but nothing says “this is the class” like a closed place which requires a password. Jim’s English 202 Ning is a closed Facebook, a social networking environment enclosed in the class itself. The message is clear.

Everyone whines about how to control all this influx of information on the web. How do we limit our input to what’s really important? pare down information to what matters to us? hold back the tide of continuous partial attention? make time for what’s real? And as teachers, how do we prevent “creepy treehouses”, invading students’ social space?

The closed course has a solution in its a message: this is where you work, not entertain yourself. Where your social contacts are for the purpose of learning. Where whatever other tools are available (RSS feeds, posting boards, Twitter), this marks the spot where you show your learning. That is its true value, not just as a screen behind which we hide, but as a filter.

Thus do I now justify my resistance to leaving a closed system for my fully online classes. It’s not that I want to hide my stuff. I don’t — it’s all CC licensed and is actually on the open web anyway, just linked from the system. It’s not that I need the gradebook.

It’s that I need to define a space as Just for Learning.

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.

Because I *really* don’t know where they’re coming from

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

This post is more technical and cognitive adjustment than social commentary, because this time I am literally concerned with where the students are coming from, as they follow links around my class.

I am reworking my forum dicussions in U.S. history, so as to better emphasize one of our Student Learning Outcomes: the development of a historical thesis. At the same time, I am trying to encourage them to post the sources they find, to emphasize discovery over just studying the resources I’ve given them, as I said I would do in my May 28 post.

As I work, I am posting my sources and linking them, as I want them to do also. Since I’m asking them to refer back to other information, I am also linking to those items. For example, I post a cartoon that is in their documents workbook. Since the class is fully online, the documents are available in a couple of places: as a link to a full workbook pdf they can print (on the course information page), and as anchored links for each document from inside the lectures (linked from assignment).

But I have noticed that when I mention the documents in discussion (the ones linked in these other places) and students discuss, they sometimes haven’t seen them. This happens on tests too. I get answers like, “I didn’t know where to find this cartoon”.

It just occurred to me that despite my well thought-out and multiply-posted instructions, they are not necessarily seeing all the material. This means they are not following links from lecture to source, as I intended. They might be printing the workbook (or not) then ignoring it, or not following the lecture links. So when a document comes up in discussion or on a test, they haven’t seen it.

When they come to discussion, then, I literally don’t know where they’re coming from. They may have read the text, the lecture, the document, or none of these. So at the risk (which I take all the time) of enabling bad work habits, I am now linking to the document inside the workbook when I post any item from it. I used Gliffy to try to visualize this:

Yes, this makes it possible for them to just get into the discussion before they’ve read anything, and open the document we’re talking about right there. Naturally, this is not what I want — I want them to have seen it first. But since they don’t necessarily do that…

Good thing that might happen: those who didn’t do the reading will at least know one source per week through discussion, plus the ones they post themselves. And my link will bring them back to the workbook, where they might discover the other assigned documents. Worth a try, no?

Demanding Flexibility

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

On a similar path to that of Christy Price, I have been shaking my head a lot about our younger crop of students, because I see so much lack of success among such bright people. In many ways, Price’s article supported my understanding, but even after reading it, I remained disillusioned: it sounds like all will be solved if I make things less boring. Trouble is, my classes aren’t boring, and my students admit that. I still have lots of D’s at the end of the semester.

I have read a great deal over the last several years about “Millenials” or the so-called “Net Generation”, beginning with EDUCAUSE’s 2005 book Educating the Net Generation and ending with Price’s article and a more current Educating the Net Generation from the University of Melbourne. I have given several presentations on what our students need in terms of instruction to match their learning styles, while at the same time experiencing joy in the energized classroom and despair at their grades. There has also been an ongoing struggle regarding their unwillingness to meet deadlines, deadlines which I need in order to control my heavy workload. As a result, I have built much flexibility into the deadlines themselves, but then I feel awful when the students fail the class because they can’t catch up on the work.

Well, after four years, these students are not only in my classroom, but in the workforce. When I read Business Week’s A Saner Workplace, I felt I understood a bit better, and could connect the academic world to what’s “out there”.

For several years we have been told that the Millenials need technology to educate them, because they are so techno-savvy. A lot of us have come to realize that such technological proficiency may be true when it comes to their cellphones and keeping tabs on their friends, but it doesn’t translate to using technology for learning. As dana boyd wrote, “Teens are not familiar with RSS feed readers or aggregators like Del.icio.us“, the types of tools that might be used for research.

We’ve also come to realize that many students care more about how they are treated as individual persons than they do about the course material, whether they learn anything, what grade they get, or whether they transfer to university. For those “cool” professors who are always ready to use different methods and adapt to changing conditions, these students have continually mystified us with their casual attitude toward their educational progress. More importantly for our working conditions, they have continually demanded that they be allowed to ignore deadlines, to submit work when they want.

Last year Pam Cox-Otto spoke to MiraCosta’s employees about teaching this new student, and humorously explained how the worldview of Millenials differs from that of Baby Boomers. Most professors apparently are Boomers, though I am actually on the cusp between Boomer and Generation X. Like the boomers, I will “work for pizza” and help out the company. Like the Gen X’ers, I am relaxed in the classroom. But here’s what she told us that Gen Y (Millenials) really wants: friends, working groups, parallel careers, and… flexibility.

The Business Week article “A Saner Workplace” is an excerpt from Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay. It doesn’t focus on Millenials or NetGeners, nor does it really focus on women, though it seems to. But it is talking about how some workers would trade some pay to get lower hours, and want to be able to telecommute or have flexible work time. What I think my students want is flexible everything. This is why so many who are not suited to online learning take online classes anyway. We have plenty of students who do not have the independence or self-discipline to learn online. They then compound a misunderstanding (that online classes will take less time) with the demand that they be able to do the work whenever they want.

Not only do I understand the insistence on controlling your own time, I am with the Millenials on this one. My desire for flexibility is almost as important to my working life as the joy in making distance education less distant through designing my own classes.

Although students who fail the online classes sometimes do so solely because they mistake flexibility for less work, most fail for the same reason on-site students fail. While I cannot yet tackle the reasons they don’t watch their grades or focus on their future, I can see their work habits causing missed deadlines. Our working society, past college, is apparently changing as people demand more flexible working conditions. This is an extension of what my students are doing: trying to get a better deal for themselves out of a system that is heavily structured, that wants to control their time.

But this play for control also seems to be based in an assumption of negotiability. My students take too many units, and don’t do their work on time, because they assume it’s all negotiable anyway, and they can just opt out if it doesn’t work. Womenomics refers to “changing priorities” and “more freedom”. The article refers particularly to dual-income couples, but gets into the generational issue, as consultant Bruce Tuglan is quoted:

They are going to be the most high-performing civic-minded workforce in the history of the world, but they are also going to be the most high-maintenance workforce in the history of the world.

I can tell you from the classroom, they already are. What they lack in academic skills, they make up for in unsupported confidence in their own abilities (likely developed through having their “self-esteem” protected at all costs, the “everyone gets a medal” soccer team syndrome). Even with those bright students who possess solid academic skills and personal determination, I still have to make provisions as things come up in their busy lives in order for them to succeed. They’re high maintenance whether they are good students or not.

My colleagues in educational technology and research firmly believe that this generation should be catered to, that curriculum should be developed around their desire to use flexible means to fulfill learning goals. Price agrees, promoting multimedia and approachability. As I dance in the no man’s land between my firm belief in the necessity of a historical base of canonical learning, and my desire to move toward offering free-form web-based research based on individual needs, it is helpful to me to see how the operational patterns of this generation are playing out in the real world.

I am not at all sure that self-directed learning will be profitable for individuals who confuse controlling their own time with doing less work, assume everything is negotiable, and can’t understand why anyone would write a blog for any reason other than helping friends keep up with ones personal life.

But there is a bright side to all this. Perhaps their unreasonable demands will lead to increased flexibility for people like me. For example, I’d really love to teach fewer classes and would happily take less money, but I am committed to minimum of 15 units per semester with 40 students per class. Maybe if I continue helping them along with increased flexibility, they can help me too, and I can afford the time to individualize their learning paths. Then they can work when they want.

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.