Category: Interactivity

The centrality of the textbook

Lisa M Lane

It is an axiom frequently ignored that any technology has to have a reason to exist in a class. The textbook is a technology. If one were to actually read it, that would be a huge investment of time in an era where attention is continually diverted. A chosen technology is either central to learning or it shouldn’t be there at all.

Students, understandably, won’t read the textbook without stakes (a quiz, a paper). Increasingly, many students cannot sustain the attention and access the vocabulary skills required to read one.

As a result, publishers and professors have developed ways to force students to read the textbook. Publisher’s courses read the book aloud to the student, provide embedded quizzes and pop-up vocabulary as they go, and assess performance before pushing the grades into the Learning Management System. Annotation systems like Perusall make it possible for students to annotate a textbook together. These approaches are far too much if we only want the textbook as background.

I confess that I’ve edited several textbooks of my own that I use in my classes. These are classes where I have substantial lecture material, so the book is context. For the first two years of the pandemic, I made reading them optional and eliminated book quizzes, but now that students are more accustomed to online learning, I’m bringing them back, with some regret.

             my new OER textbook

This regret is coloring my view as I design two “new” World History classes (I’ve only taught them in the classroom and that was many years ago). For the first, I’ve spend the last several months with the Cengage textbook I’ve chosen, and made it central to the short recorded lectures. In these lectures I explain the chapter, note its strengths and weaknesses, clarify points. The lecture itself is quizzed internally, using the quiz function in Canvas Studio. Class starts in a little over a week. I hope it works, but either way I’ve made the book central to the class.

Now I think about the other half of the course. For this one, world history to 1500, I have found an Open Educational Resource, a free textbook. Of course, it’s only free in its electronic form. So I’m thinking how to use it, since it must be central. I have no lectures prepared for the class, and am not sure I want them.

So, a new idea. Since it’s free and electronic, I could put it inside Perusall, the social annotation program. But instead of expecting students to annotate, or requiring that they do it (as I do with primary sources), perhaps I’ll put in the annotations little videos of me, glossing the text myself that way. Perhaps I’ll ask questions, invite participation, and grade it in Perusall.

In the old days we turned up our noses at “teaching from the textbook”, ridiculing those who tied their lectures to it. Perhaps we felt that we could leave students alone with the textbook, and they’d read and understand it. I doubt this was ever true, but in a world where we can chose to eschew the textbook entirely, create ungrading schemes, and have at our fingertips more resources to share than ever before, we should consider the textbook differently.

The increasingly possible: online labs

Lisa M Lane

Ever since I discovered the back pages in H. G. Wells’s Text-book of Biology, (1893),  I’ve known a bit about scientific work being done at home. Doing “practical work” at home was important for correspondence education at the end of the 19th century, so that students could study for examinations even if they didn’t have access to a laboratory.

When online teaching started at our college, back in 1998, and began to grow, a number of science instructors were concerned. You could do a lecture online, fine, but you couldn’t do a lab. Simulations weren’t enough, they said. You need real materials. Wells’s students, of course, had real materials. They ordered them by mail or, in the case of frogs, went and caught them.

So here we are in 2020, with online labs foisted onto unsuspecting faculty, and they’ve done brilliantly. I attended this session, where four professors, from auto shop to biotechnology, showed how they do labs online. For inspiration alone it’s worth the 50+ minutes.

MiraCosta College: Hands-On Labs in an Online World on Vimeo.

It’s an odd feeling for me, a promoter and practitioner of online education since the 1990s, to see that the materials (lab kits, go-pro cameras, etc) have come so far. But it’s even more thrilling to see the new attitudes, confidence, and willingness to serve students this way. It feels (finally!) like the new world we were hoping for.

As I watched, I thought like a student. In-person education isn’t always the best way to learn. When I was 19, if I’d had a way to learn about cars without having  to show my ignorance to the guys in auto shop, I might know how to fix my car today. I was shy, and had already been subject to sexism in art class — I certainly wouldn’t walk into a guy-dominated shop. I was also clumsy, but if I’d been able to make mistakes with those test tubes at home, I might have given it a try in high school or college. (I actually had a chemistry set as a child, and created something so horrid the chemistry prof at the local university had to be called so we knew how to dispose of it.)

At any rate, I think H. G. Wells would be proud. I’m delighted.

Modified Ungrading

Lisa M Lane

I have written a lot on this blog about grading, about my longing for “ungrading”, my qualms about heading that direction, and the things I’ve decided to do instead. This is a more specific post about the latter, and my gradual shift in emphasis I’m calling “Modified Ungrading”.

We know the arguments against A-F grades. They encourage a focus on marks rather than learning, and they can be discouraging. We know there are also arguments in favor. They rank performance against a standard, they inform the student of their level of success, and they mark improvement. (Many years ago I heard a speaker say he did not want to drive across a bridge built by someone who got a C in engineering, or be operating on by someone who got Cs in medical school. I get that.)

This is an area where faculty workload and student desires can profitably intersect. Most of us teach large groups of students, and at community college we do it without teaching assistants. The big argument in favor of ungrading is that students benefit more from individualized feedback than from grades. But in this environment, tutorial-style feedback and individualized learning isn’t possible. Auto-grading, with current technology, is possible, and helps fill the gap between grading and ungrading.

In most learning management systems, when a student submits something, a certain number of points can be automatically assigned. The arguments for and against doing this are the same as those for grading in general. But in addition, auto-grading provides immediate marking and a sense of completion, two factors which are often ignored in discussions of grades vs feedback.

So far, I’ve implemented auto-grading for two types of assignments, both of which are submitted only to me: lecture notes, and document paragraphs. What this enables me to do is have 2 points automatically assigned, then go back and look at the work itself. Sure, I could assign the points when I look, but auto-grading instead changes things, for me and for the students.

For the students, they get their two points immediately, so it’s confirming they did it. For me, I then have ample time to go back and peruse their work. And with the points already given, I can pay more attention to my Assignment Comments (feedback). The tendency is to talk to them first, then think about the grade, instead of the reverse.

I’ve had to change the grade sometimes, but I’ve had the chance to explain individually before doing that, and to give an opportunity for corrections.

This shift to Modified Ungrading may seem ridiculously subtle, but it’s quite real. Mentally I can shift from “processing” the work of 40 students per section, to responding to it personally.

In fall, I intend to apply this to discussion forums, which we use for posting primary sources. Ultimately, I would like everything auto-scored except writing assignments, on which I can spend more individual time.

This way, I can focus my work more on communication than grading. And when students see their points immediately, and rarely changed, I’m hoping they will do the same.

Perusing pictures

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I almost forgot, in all the madness, that I am trying an experiment in my History of Technology class. I detailed the idea in my post from July. But I hadn’t implemented it till this semester.

First a review: in every class I teach online, instead of a traditional discussion board, I assign a set of primary source documents. I put these in Perusall (using the LTI in Canvas), uploaded as a pdf. Students then can select parts of the text, and annotate it. They can respond to each others annotations, and add images or video to help each other read the material.

This semester I’ve tried it with images. I put together two sets of images in Microsoft Word, one for images from the Book of Hours of the Duc de Berry (for the Middle Ages), and one for a collection of postcards from the early 20th century imagining the world in 2000 (for the turn of the 20th century). I then saved each collection as a pdf, and uploading them into Perusall.

I’ve just been reviewing the latter. The History of Technology class is always difficult to get talking. The class attracts a wonderful assortment of students, particularly those in computer science or who already work in information technology. They don’t tend to be much for chit-chat, and some of the written articles on technological history don’t interest them. The pictures, however, have created much more participation.

You can see here that not only did they comment on the images, but that they also replied a lot to each other (the bubble with the number is replies to the comment showing).

So I’m calling this one a success, and plan to do more!

Disaggregated knowledge and the LMS

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

The advantage of teaching so many classes online is that I see patterns in student messages that lead me into larger issues. This one is HUGE. It’s not just about Canvas. It’s about the decline of Western education as we know it.

I stopped using Modules last term, because they “flattened” the elements of my class, making it appear as though each were of equal worth. Modules also forced students along a linear path of that week’s work.

I instead chose to keep my weekly pages, which list the things we do each week and when they’re due. I use bold for the higher-stakes assignments. Canvas automatically puts my due dates on the Calendar, and thus populates the students’ To-Do and Upcoming lists, which appear on the main (Home) page.

Over the years, more and more classes have switched to Canvas, so the average full-time student at MiraCosta would have four classes in a term. What the Canvas Calendar does is acts like any other calendar — it lists the tasks for each day or each week or each month. On the student Canvas app, it shows the To-Do list for each week from all their classes.

Sound convenient? It is convenient in the same way that bottled water is convenient, and that credit cards are convenient. It undermines traditional relationships globally, and creates a sea change.

Yes, I probably sound crazy saying that the Canvas Calendar represents the decline of Western education as we know it. But bear with me.

This week, the first week of class, I have had an unusual number of students message me saying they missed the assignment because they didn’t “see” it. By probing this, I’ve discovered that they mean it isn’t appearing in the To-Do list. This is regardless of the fact that I did check to the box to add these items to the To-Do list (I”ll check that technical issue later). I quickly responded with the yellow highlighted note on the Home page you see below, but I still was getting apology messages for missing work they couldn’t tell they needed to do.

This morrning a student wrote me saying she was sorry she missed it, but the primary source assignment wasn’t on the To-Do list. I sent a student my screenshot in Student View, showing that the assignment was indeed appearing on the list.

 

She replied with two screenshots where it wasn’t there. Here’s the one she sent from her phone:

And it suddenly hit me. The process she’s accessing, the To-Do List, lists all the tasks for all the classes a student takes. It thus disaggregates the courses entirely. She’s no longer taking my History class, or a Sociology class. She’s just doing work, clicking links, crossing things off a list.

By showing the student the tasks for the day, for all three of her classes, Canvas has not only reasserted its contention that all learning tasks are equivalent, but that they are tasks unrelated to anything else. They are just stuff the student needs to complete.

Most scholars think in terms of their field, then teachers think in terms of wrapping elements together to encourage understanding. On my weekly page, you can see that the tasks for the week relate to each other. They are all part of that week’s topic. They follow sequentially: first post the primary source (forum), then check it for points (quiz). My design has instantly become irrelevant.

My practical response today has been to go through all my classes, adding the weekly page to the To-Do list, as the first thing that week. It will be tricker to do this for my lectures and other non-graded or linked items, since Canvas doesn’t “see” those at all. I will have to link each on a Page and put the Page on the To-Do list, forcing students to click twice to get to it. This will take all weekend.

But my holistic response is much more important. The units we teach are no longer units — they contain no flow or contiguity when seen as disparate tasks. If students access all academic work as a flat list of tasks, there is no connection between assignments. There is no connection, for example, between Reading 3 and Quiz 3. Assign the Reading for Monday. Assign the Reading Quiz for Wednesday, and it isn’t clear they relate to each other.

This explains the other messages I’m receiving. “I see we have a Lecture quiz due, but what is that on?” At first I smirked and thought, “The Lecture, of course!” But now I realize they don’t see the Lecture unless they’re on the weekly page. “The Calendar says the second post is due – where do I post?” You can’t put two due dates for the same discussion forum. They don’t know where to return to in order to post.

In an age when we worry that students don’t read whole books, we have something here that is much worse. How can they do sequential and scaffolded learning when the system won’t let you scaffold?

It changes the rules utterly. Here are the “new” rules (some have been good practice for awhile):

1. Assessment and responses must appear with the content.

Quiz 3, in other words, must contain Reading 3 within it. You can’t have a link for Reading 3 on Monday and Quiz 3 on Wednesday.

Note here that group text annotation, of the kind I’m using in Perusall, is ideal. The content and the activity are inextricably linked.

2. Double-level discussion may not work.

In Canvas, to have students return to a discussion, it will be necessary to link to that same discussion in the Calendar later in the week.

One alternative will be to have the entire class inside a discussion forum. This won’t work in Canvas because it doesn’t allow real threads, but might work in other systems.

3. Navigation schemes are useless.

Obviously, my own weekly page navigation, even if it’s on the To-Do list, is worked against forcefully by Canvas.

Some would say return to Modules. But Canvas’ own Modules are irrelevant, except for adaptive release, or to force task order. Students won’t use the Modules page either, even if it’s the main page. They may never see it.

This also applies to the Home page itself, especially a nice one. It is now obsolete. All we’ve learned about making the Home page welcoming is irrelevant.

Again, the new rules (and I’m sure there will be more as we all think about it) are the result of the disaggregation of content and tasks. This is both an effect of the technology, and a cause of the disaggregation of knowledge. We’d better plan accordingly.

Ending the reading/quiz cycle

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

I certainly didn’t mean for the relationship to end suddenly. It has been tenuous for awhile, various arguments and complaints, but I always thought it was a communication problem. But finally I had to walk away.

In my History of England class, the textbook has been an issue for a long time. The most suitable and available academic text, by the Messrs Roberts, is two volumes, so that won’t work. The class is, unfortunately, only one semester (we have two for the history of the U.S., with a much shorter history). And realistically, even one volume is asking for trouble.

All the books I’ve used, including works by Roy Strong, Asa Briggs, and F.E. Halliday are outdated, out of print, or both. These have been replaced by volumes that sell well in the U.K., but require a previous knowledge lacking in American students: works by Jeremy Black, Simon Schama, and Simon Jenkins. I’ve been using the Penguin Illustrated History, which I love. It’s visual, I’ve written a bunch of quizzes for it, and it’s beautifully written. But students have become less enthusiastic, and it’s outdated now anyway.

Besides, it costs money. All my other classes require only my own pdf textbook, freely downloadable and printable. We are now required to indicate in the class registration system if we have a low-cost or no-cost class, so that automatically creates competition among classes as students realize they can take a class for less money. This was my last class with a textbook that had to be purchased, and it wasn’t easy for the bookstore, or students online, to find an inexpensive copy. So I unceremoniously dumped the textbook, and spend a couple of weeks this summer downloading, editing, and reformatting appropriate pages from the web. Then I wrote matching quizzes.

Canvas is not user friendly when it comes to importing, editing, and reusing quizzes, in any format. It’s test banks are obscure and hard to use. The result of my machinations was a set of single-question, matching quizzes for the new readings, and my old (now five-question) multiple-choice quizzes for my lecture. So I put one due Wednesday and the other Sunday.

Well, now the weekly course page was becoming really cluttered:

I don’t want to go all Copernican on this, but if I were a student it’s starting to look like hoops to jump through, instead of ways to explore material.

So I thought, what do I want them to get out of the reading anyway? My lectures already have a good outline of the main events of English political, social, and cultural history. And the depth is already provided by the documents we “read and discuss” (i.e. annotate in Perusall) each week. These readings are pretty intense for today’s community college students (Magna Carta, Archbishop Cranmer). So instead of adding new readings, it may be better to have them deal with these documents more.

I spent yesterday deleting all the quizzes, both lecture and reading. Instead, I’m having each student submit a “Document analysis paragraph” which uses all the names of the documents to support any single idea they have about the era we’re studying. I made a silly sample paragraph to model what I want them to do:

It’s in the form of a single-question graded survey, which will automatically apply points if they turn it in, so I can read them at my leisure and communicate individually with students who are struggling. And now students are doing, not reading and quizzing.

And thus I’ve broken the entire reading/quiz cycle in one swoop. I didn’t set out to do this — it just happened. But I’m pretty sure I’ll have no regrets.

 

Class annotation of images

Lisa M Lane

This is another post where I share how I did something, solely so I don’t forget how to do it.

Perusall is a wonderful program for annotating documents with a whole class, and I’m currently using it for all my online classes, which are located in the horror of an LMS they call Canvas. I upload a PDF, and students and I can highlight the document, with a panel popping up for discussion. When anyone clicks on the question mark, it indicates a request for responses. When anyone uses @Someone, it notifies them someone has responded. I have used it to solve the “what if they don’t do the reading?” problem, since we all kind of do the reading together.

All this is great. The system “auto-grades” (though I have to set it then check it very carefully), and pushes the grades to Canvas gradebook on my command, so I can focus on the discussion itself instead of evaluating it.

But you can’t do this with images — just upload and everyone talk about it.

Except…you can. Perusall won’t upload images natively, nor link to images directly on the web. So I downloaded an image, and saved it as a pdf in Preview, then uploaded it. Then I clicked on a section of the picture. Instead of highlighting text, Perusall put a pin. I can then ask a question or make a comment about just that portion of the image. Click the pin, and the conversation panel opens.

But the interface itself takes up a lot of the screen, which we don’t want for images. So I’m going to show students what to do about that:

If they do it, then it will look like this:

More room for the image, less clutter. I’m thinking it would be possible to put several images on a page to be discussed for that week.

What it’s doing is similar to ThingLink, which I learned about from our wonderful art historians over a decade ago. But ThingLink and similar programs, although they can be embedded into Canvas with iframes, cannot track a student’s comments, nor auto-grade them. Perusall can, which shortens my workflow so I can focus on the discussion, just as I do with annotated text.

So, annotations for images when I teach a European history course that focuses on the Humanities, and a History of Technology class that can get bogged down in text? I’m in!

 

The hour before the deadline

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

We all have stories, usually told while shaking ones head, of how students do things at the last minute.

Long ago, the deadlines for my online classes were set at 5 pm on the day something was due. But “everyone else” (the dozen or so others teaching online) set theirs at Sunday midnight. I would receive panicked emails between 5 pm and midnight, or after an assignment was graded late. So my nicely planned evenings of sitting and marking papers didn’t work. I changed my deadlines to Sunday midnight.

So when I began using Perusall for annotations, I asked, repeatedly, for students to participate beginning on Tuesday and ending Sunday midnight. Some do so. But many try to read five documents and cram in all the annotations on Sunday. This prevents the close reading I had intended by assigning annotations in the first place, an issue for another post. But it also provides a bizarre opportunity.

Perusall emails me when a student answers a question I’ve posted.  It also emails when a student tags me with an @. Throughout each Sunday, these emails increase, with a flood of them in the last hour: 11 pm to midnight.

If I go into Perusall on Sunday night between 11 pm and midnight, I can participate in the discussion, adding questions and using @ to reply to individual students, and I’ll get a response. It becomes almost synchronous.

I’m not saying I do this every week and every class, but if I’ve assigned a particularly difficult document (last week’s Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer comes to mind), I can engage a great deal of the class at that hour.

No, I’m not recommending this. But it does seem to open potential for the last hour before the deadline. I have a colleague who uses Google Docs and notices that same activity shortly before the deadline — he sees the number of participant bubbles at the top increase as he watches.

So I wonder two things. First, is it safe now that we have many online classes to change deadlines to a more reasonable hour? And is the last hour before the deadline an opportunity to teach that we should be using?

Continual feedback on my work

Lisa M Lane

Recently, I added a new assignment to my online classes, called Lecture Notes.

It’s just a one-screen write-in-the-box assignment, with the following instructions:

 

It automatically scores credit when they submit it. This is for two reasons: immediate feedback/acknowledgement of the submission, and so I don’t have to rush to grade anything. I can stop by and enjoy them all, reading through, at my leisure.

My original intention was just to make sure they were somehow responsible for the lectures, into which I’ve put a huge amount of work. These lectures are written out, with audio of me reading the lecture, illustrations, iframes with the assigned readings, embedded video, music snippets, and quite a bit of my own personality and interpretation. I’ve created them for all six of my classes, 15-16 lectures each (one per week). I don’t want them ignored!

But what’s happened is even better, thanks to the first and last bits of my instructions.

The “implied thesis” has told me a lot about whether my interpretation is getting through. Fact is, most students don’t get this idea, and just tell me what the lecture was about: “You talked about immigrants coming over from other countries and the impact of industrialization”. But some students comprehend that this is interpretation: “You implied that the capitalist system made it difficult for labor unions to succeed”.

Even better is the “brief response” I’ve requested. This has given me a chance to talk with students directly.

Those who don’t understand that I’m an interpreter of history write things like, “I don’t agree that the Romans should have invaded Gaul”, so I get that they’re responding to certain events. But often they tell me things like, “I was surprised that the new household technologies made more work for women” or “I didn’t know that Augustus Caesar was a title instead of a name” or “it made me really sad to learn how immigrants were treated in the factories” or “this seems just like today”.  Sometimes they ask questions like, “why did Cleopatra kill herself instead of just sending a big army against Octavian?”

I can respond to each student privately, which often opens an ongoing dialogue. And the cool thing is: it’s always about the material, never about the grades/assessment/navigation. They’re real conversations, about history.

It’s like ongoing feedback for me – it tells me what’s getting through, how I’m doing, and what they think.

It’s entirely possible that it’s all there, and could replace stultifying assessments like quizzes, or (shock!) papers. We’ll see. For now, it’s just great.

New Title V and substantive interaction

Lisa M Lane

In its wisdom, the state is proposing the following changes for online classes:

Originally, the issue was teacher-student contact, a response to the fear that teachers would just upload stuff and not do any work. Now they’ve decided to legislate pedagogy, and insist on student-student contact.

I know several faculty who aren’t happy about this, because their pedagogy doesn’t rely on student-student interaction. Rather their course is set up to maximize student interaction with the course materials. Several instructors I know engage students in highly individualized feedback. One responds to each student’s posted analysis of each reading each week. Another evaluates submitted assignments in great detail. They both have in-depth, ongoing, substantive contact with every single student. Neither relies on students interacting with each other.

So this is bogus from the start, pedagogically speaking. The state has decided to intervene in methodology, based on research that is questionable at best. Studies using physical classroom research, for example, compare straight lecture to group activities (active learning). They tend to ignore the many other activities that can be assigned in an online class but aren’t reliant on other students (for example, instant feedback on a quiz question). Other studies of “community” in online classes focus on the affective domain rather than the quality of work. While it is an option, it is not necessary to have student-to-student interaction for a student to feel like part of the class; that can also be achieved through instructor presence, student-instructor interaction, and student-content interaction. Focusing on students interacting also ignores the teacher-student tutorial model,  which provides individualized responses. Many students want individual attention far more than they want “community”.

But we don’t make the rules.

Since the state is so dedicated to the word “substantive”, I looked it up:

Substantive- “Having a firm basis in reality and so important, meaningful, or considerable.” (Oxforddictionaries.com)

1. denoting substance, 2. expressing existence, 3. meaningful or important (OED)

So if it’s there and it’s real, it’s fine. An instructor, without being pressured, wouldn’t have such interactions if they didn’t believe them to be important or meaningful. In the case of “considerable”, a class that has a lot of meaningless discussion would also be covered.

This brings us to Lisa’s Rule on Rules: when confronted with legislative stupidity, it is usually best to look at what you’re already doing and see if it can be used to demonstrate that your work already complies with the new rule.

Tonight I attended a wonderfully balanced session on the new pending rules. It was led by Sean Davis, our wonderful sociologist at MiraCosta. He noted the controversy over the rule, but focused on options for how to create such interactions. These included discussion/question forums, emails between students, peer feedback, student groups, interactive video (we have a pilot for Arc), video conferencing, chat, and collaborative projects. I would add to this group annotation, which is a major source of interaction in my own classes.

For those instructors who do any sort of student-student interaction, it should not be hard to justify what they do within the new context. It is indeed these instructors who are most concerned about the new law.

Most instructors have a discussion forum. Some of these are problematic or meaningless, but if they do it every week, they’re good. I can justify much of my students’ work, because in addition to annotating written primary sources, they post their visual sources in a forum, and “like” the sources they enjoy. “Like” is interaction, and if you ask students to “like” for a purpose (they plan to use the idea, or vote up ideas the class will use), it’s meaningful.

This sort of “passive interaction” or “accidental interaction” can satisfy the rule. Passive interaction is like a cocktail party — everyone is in the same place but not necessarily at the same time or for the same purpose. But they see what the others are doing, and adapt their behavior according. Open forums where students post assignments can serve this purpose. Particularly if they’re graded only individually, and privately, posted student work can help other students see where they stand, demonstrate alternative ways of doing the work, and serve as examples.

So the professor who has students submit their assignments directly to her could instead have them submitted to a forum (if necessary, the forum could be set not to show other work until ones own work is submitted). The prof who responds to his students individually after they post in a forum could add a summary post noting the contributions of particular students, asking that they be used as examples.

I admit that I am completely uncomfortable with asking students to email or message each other privately, and I have never been a fan of peer feedback although I know people who do it well. And I remain appalled (I am often appalled) that the rules never seem to care about the interaction between the student and the content. Where’s the rule that says courses should include deep, sustained, meaningful interaction between the individual student and the materials being studied? Where’s the rule that says courses should integrate important and meaningful contact between the student and the norms of the discipline?

It’s bad enough that so many courses contain discussion forums because the instructors think they should. That has been going on for years, even before this rule was enacted. The inevitable response to the new rule will be more one-post-two-reply “discussions” that frustrate online teachers and become rote and meaningless for students. Surely the new rule must be a misguided attempt to replicate the classroom, except perhaps the people who wrote it haven’t been in one for awhile. Where’s the rule requiring students in a non-distance education class to be forced to interact with each other?

In the meantime, such attempts should be dealt with by showing that what we already do satisfies the rule. It’s just a shame that we have to.

 

 

Surf report

Lisa M Lane

If you’re from around here, you know what a surf report it: “moderate waves today, let’s call it waist-high” a la Scott Bass on KPBS radio.

This is a report of today’s web-surfing, which is kinda different. Sometimes it’s piled a lot higher than my waist, but today I learned a lot, much of it triggered by Twitter posts. I don’t think I’m the only one who uses the “like” heart to file things for later, so I could find these again.

History Assessments

Except the first one. Somehow I found the Stanford History Education Group, and their Beyond the Bubble assessments. I’m not sure why I’ve never heard of this, but it’s a collection of items for teaching U.S. History. While geared toward the high school AP crowd, the method here is quite useful for college history. The primary source is embedded into the assessment. So for example, there would be a newspaper engraving of a protest from Harper’s Weekly, then a short list of facts related to that engraving, then open short answer questions. Sometimes these asked students to assess the veracity of the document itself in light of the other facts, or they might ask the student to say what the source tells us about the era.

These are short (usually just two short answers) and there’s a rubric with each one, indicating the level (proficient, emergent, basic) of various student responses. Some even include sample student answers that one is likely to see. Although undoubtedly intended to be used solely by the instructor, it might be interesting to give the rubric to students and have them analyze their own work!

The site has many assessments that a teacher could download, but it was their design that gave me ideas, because I could create my own assessments for any primary source I have.

And it was kind of eerie that I had just changed all my Learning Units to be inside the assessments. I must be very trendy in terms of design!

Cycloramas

Next, I found a serious gap in my knowledge about the history of media. A tweet by Civil War historian Lisa Tendrich Frank led me to a Smithsonian Magazine article on the restoration of the cylcorama in Atlanta. Apparently, during the 1880s, cycloramas were a huge draw as entertainment. Painters created 360-degree paints, attached to the walls of a circular building, and people would come to experience it. The article notes a scene might have a dirt floor and some trees to add a reality-inducing effect.

Beginning in the 1880s, these completely circular paintings started appearing from half a dozen companies, such as the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee, where Atlanta’s canvas was conceived. APC employed more than a dozen German painters, led by a Leipzig native named Friedrich Heine.

Half a dozen companies? How could I not have known about this? This isn’t just virtual reality, it’s late 19th century entertainment for the people. The closest I’ve gotten to in-the-round entertainment was the film they used to have at Disneyland, America the Beautiful, a movie made with multiple cameras that surrounded you. Yeah, I know, in days where the Google truck drives through your neighborhood, this may seem archaic, but it was very cool.

So now I have a whole research area to discover.

Paratexts

Can I use this word in a sentence? It shouldn’t be new to me: it’s a word I keep bumping into, but somehow it never entered my thinking as something I could use.

A tweet by early Americanist Michelle Orihel sent me to Digital Paxton, and reading the post I had an Aha! moment. Advertising and editors’ notes and issue numbers, as included in Victorian periodicals, would be paratext! I may not have a theory, but I at least have a structure, an interpretation, a word I can use for what these types of things are.

Some days it’s enough to learn one new useful word.

Blackmail

The last item for today was a piece of email spam. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to open these, but there was no attachment and I decided to read it. I found it fascinating.

The title was:

Security Alert. lisa@lisahistory.net was compromised. Password must be changed.

The email went on to explain that my account had been hacked, my information and surfing habits downloaded, and they wanted money, paid in Bitcoin. The blackmailer explained how s/he got access:

How I made it:
In the software of the router, through which you went online, was a vulnerability.
I just hacked this router and placed my malicious code on it.
When you went online, my trojan was installed on the OS of your device.

I noticed that there aren’t any contractions where you’d expect, indicating this person does not speak English natively. The OS of my device?

They also claimed to know that I have pornographic habits:

A month ago, I wanted to lock your device and ask for a not big amount of btc to unlock.
But I looked at the sites that you regularly visit, and I was shocked by what I saw!!!
I’m talk you about sites for adults.

I want to say – you are a BIG pervert. Your fantasy is shifted far away from the normal course!

There’s a normal course for the viewing of pornography online? I had no idea. But that explains why so much money was being requested.

I’m know that you would not like to show these screenshots to your friends, relatives or colleagues.
I think $701 is a very, very small amount for my silence.
Besides, I have been spying on you for so long, having spent a lot of time!

Wait, $701? Cheap at twice the price!

After payment, my virus and dirty screenshots with your enjoys will be self-destruct automatically.
If I do not receive from you the specified amount, then your device will be locked, and all your contacts will receive a screenshots with your “enjoys”.

I guess we’ll see…

(Discovered after posting: turns out this is a known spam thing and I should dedicate as much worry about it as I have already done. So that’s five things learned online today!)

First road test of Hypothes.is

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

It’s all about annotation, and I’ve been comparing Kami and Hypothes.is. Last semester, I used Kami  ($50 for no ads) for students to annotate text with my History of Technology class. I had some success, but I was not happy with its limitations, so this summer I tried Hypothes.is instead.

The students were offered a video tutorial on how to use it. I made a group just for them. The assignment was extra credit — for each of the three classes I uploaded an article for them to read and annotate, replying to each other. Sample instructions:

Extra credit for up to 3% of the grade:
1) Get your own account at Hypothes.is at https://hypothes.is/register. Please use your name as enrolled for the username.
2) Join the test group at https://hypothes.is/groups/n3an6ndm/test-group.
3) Go to https://via.hypothes.is/fand.lunarservers.com/~lisahi2/hist104/AnAggravatingAbsence.pdf
4) Annotate the article with your own responses and answer those of others. Annotations are graded on academic quality, connections to coursework, acknowledgement’s of others’ ideas, and evidence of understanding of the article.

I had been concerned that they would automatically post in Public instead of in the Test Group, because I could find no way to limit that or point them directly to the group page – the choice is made only via a drop-down menu in the upper right corner. Sure enough, several students posted in Public and missed the discussion going on in the group. I will have to add this to the instructions as well as in the tutorial.

I had thought that analysis and counting their contributions would be made easier by the brilliantly conceived Hypothesis Collector, created by John Stewart. It worked great last night. Unfortunately, when I tried it this morning, it only gave me the posts that had been made as of last night. I simply couldn’t get it to work and had to manually count annotations to assign points. I have been contacted by Jeremy Dean of Hypothes.is for ways to integrate with Canvas – this might be a huge help next year.

I am considering providing my next class textbook, The American Yawp, with my own annotations. The book, an open textbook, has a number of faults and omissions that would make for great learning opportunities for students. My own annotations would be like mini-lecture commentary, glossing on the text. But for some of the summer articles (one out of three of mine) in Hypothes.is, the section one highlights is quoted in the annotation without spaces, which is ugly. Also, there is little color or design in the annotation box to alert the student to the presence or unique character of an annotation.

Samplehypothesis

I think Kami looks better for this, and then I will export my pages as PDF for the students.

Kamisample

I had originally thought I could use The American Yawp’s own affordances as an updated online text, but just got an announcement that, ironically, their current update will be integrating Hypothes.is. Each page served by them will then come up with an invitation to annotate publicly. While this might or might not help students with the text, it provides an additional way for students to go wrong beside the Public or Group problem, so I don’t think I’ll be working off the Yawp html pages regardless.

Don’t get me wrong – the business model of Hypothes.is is wonderful. They make a real effort to reach out, adapt and update. In fact, that’s one of the reasons for this post – to provide input that I hope will continue its improvement as an open source product made by people who really understand the value of text annotation.

Results from 131 students

Lisa M Lane

It’s only taken me 17 years of teaching online to develop a student survey that is both broad enough to cover all my classes and narrow enough to give me good feedback.

Just sharing a few things here. Total students responding was 131. Most students responding were passing the class.

ClassElementsRestuls

They still like my lectures the most, and textbook readings the least. They still like posting their own primary sources.

AddtlElementsResults

Hours and hours of work on that Help Page and – no surprise given what they email me about – they don’t use it. They do like seeing the whole course on one page (so I won’t switch to showing only the current week, an option in Moodle) and they like my comments and the audio of my lectures (I’ll read it for you!). The None category is a little depressing….

EngagementResults

The engagement results are clear, too. They like the lectures and posting their own source. They don’t like reading much. But they really liked what I added this year – the completion checkboxes on the Moodle page. I will be sad to lose that. But note: they like seeing each other’s work, but don’t require contact with other students. I’ve been saying that for awhile – collaboration and teamwork is online classes is not always needed. For my class, engagement with the work and posting what you find may be taking the place of “interaction” among students. They can learn from each other without necessarily engaging in forums in response to each others’ posts.

I know where you’re coming from

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Starting a new year means starting a new semester, and this time it will start a week early.

The issue today was IM. My classes are in Moodle, but I’ve always used a status button so students can communicate with me instantly if I’m online.

Moodle has something called Messages. Back in version 1.x, I couldn’t tell which class a student was in when they Messaged me. Instead of fixing this in 2.x, they made it worse by removing all user information outside the courses completely, making it not only impossible to tell which class a student was in, but impossible to get back to where you were working in your course site.

I used to use Google Talk Chatback Badge instead.  It didn’t tell me which class a student was in, but at least it was easy to let them know I was available, and they didn’t have to have a Google account or log in. That’s gone. The option now is Hangouts and other stuff where they have to join Googleland. I can’t be responsible for making someone violate their own privacy that way.

Then it was Plupper, which I routed through iChat. It’s been down all week. I don’t know if it’s coming back, but all week isn’t OK, so I went hunting again.

I was getting miffed that I couldn’t find what I wanted. I was running all over the web trying to find a free service. I began to realize I didn’t really need “chat”, but some sort of help-desky thing. I was at first delighted to find Zoho LiveDesk (link removed at request of Zoho) which I could adapt. i could even create different badges for different classes. Then I discovered that this multi-button feature was only available on paid accounts – it turned out I had somehow entered a 30 trial that would expire. So much for that.

Then it occurred to me. I rent my own server space – I wondered what open source stuff was hanging out there? I found Mibew, and installed it. It even built its own database (though I had to go in and tweak a bit).

Their button was not exactly what I needed (I won’t be turning blonde and I’ve never looked that happy):

mibew_on

 

So I got into GIMP and made my own:

newchat_on
Then I made one for offline:

newchat_off

 

After installing Mibew, I was able to set up each class as a “group”, then create button code for each group, so I can see which class they’re coming from! A unique button went onto each class site – I tested them and they work.

I used the Localization feature (which was highly customizable) to change “Live Support” to “For My History Students”, my designation as “operator” to “teacher”, and the language of client and user to student.

It may not be perfect. It may fail. It may crash. Keep in mind, I don’t code. I just know enough to change other people’s code.

But as I was doing this today, I suddenly realized I was Reclaiming the Web, a goal of many smart people for 2014. Happy New Year!

Lecture, sources & discovery

Lisa M Lane

Lecture is not about discovery, unless it is the discovery of how the professor processes and uses information. It can be excellent modelling. When I talk through a historical subject, and its significance, I can model how historians think.

But most professors lecture in order to relay information. This always seemed silly to me, since the “information” was in the book. Now the “information” is on the web. But if they don’t read the information, and understand it, they can get it from the lecture.

In my online lectures, there is indeed information. It is told from my perspective, and everything about it (including what I choose to discuss) represents my interpretation. Because it contains events and dates, and explains them chronologically, it constitutes “content” in the class. My online lectures include my own writing (recorded in audio), links to websites, embedded video, and specially marked links to primary sources.

These sources were originally collected in a paper workbook. Now each unit’s collection is on a web page. Some of them have audio reading the documents (as I’d like to do with Edmund Burke). Questions on these documents are included in the lecture quiz each week.

In “discussion”, my students do not discuss, but rather post their own primary sources, then write about several of the ones posted and the way they tell us something about that era. Through this process I teach historical writing (thesis and evidence).

This week something interesting happened.

In my Depression lecture for US History, I feature a section on Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, his radio broadcast from Halloween 1938:

 lecturewarofworlds

But not until a student posted it as a YouTube video did any of them, as far as I can tell, actually listen to it.

Then this happened:

warworldsdisc

So I’m thinking. No one went to find the audio before, but they watched a video (that’s really just audio) posted in the forum. Someone was interested because a fellow student posted it. Sure, she posted it because it was mentioned in lecture (maybe), but a student actually experienced it because it was posted by another student rather than by me.

So….back to those other primary sources, the ones I actually assign. Those written primary sources are posted by me as part of the lecture. I suspect few actual read them except to answer quiz questions.

Perhaps if they discovered them instead of me providing the sources? We already do that – they find and post sources every week. Maybe I shouldn’t select sources at all. Perhaps the collection they make is fine – especiallly if they actually look at or listen to what the others post.

I must think on the implications of instructor-provided content. We have this idea that instructors need to curate content. I could do that in a different, more engaging way. But first I need to be sure that, at least when it comes to primary sources, I should be doing it at all.

What do you mean no tags? Conceptualizing what online teachers need.

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

So I had this great idea that next semester, when students post their primary sources in the forum, they could tag them with a topic. I could provide a list of tags that represent larger areas, the sort of topics they can later work into historical themes: fashion, war, society, medicine, politics, economy, etc. This would work better than search, and allow them to browse the collection they’d created as they thought about their research approach.

But when I went to look at the settings in Moodle (1.9 and 2.2 and 2.3), there was no such thing as tags for a forum post, or even a glossary entry (my other new idea). Moodle only has tags for student “blogs”, which are connected only to each student’s profile and do not work in any interconnected way.

This was a big reminder that Moodle is still an LMS, and that sometimes I simply cannot configure it to do what I need. In WordPress such a thing is a no-brainer, and of course I can set this up in WP, but didn’t I just decide there was no real need for that?

It occurred to me that what I want to do represents an overlap that LMS thinkers don’t understand – the interrelationship between “content” and “activity”. The main Moodle blocks have two drop-down menus when you want to add something, and they clearly indicate the mindset:

A “resource” is supposed to be static, and an “activity” is supposed to be interactive.

A “forum” is considered an activity, a platform for “discussion”. I’m not using it for discussion, but rather for having students create a set of resources (without that nasty confusion a database would bring into play). The students are thus actively creating a “resource” that they need to search and access throughout the class. The lack of acknowledgement of such interplay is what leads designers to think of tags only in terms of blogs.

I am also setting up some secondary historical readings for my Honors class, and there’s no way in Moodle to have students annotate them together.

I just want a static resource, an article, that I’ve introduced, and have students annotate it collaboratively. The only “activity” available in Moodle would be a wiki, and it would not allow in-line commentary. I admit I’m somewhat Talmudic in my idea of what a collaboratively annotated document would look like. So I’ll be trying a circuitous route, uploading a pdf article into Crocodoc, then embedding the resulting doc in a Moodle page to allow for in-place commenting without students needing an account. It’s an awkward solution at best, and one which requires me to wear a Fair Use t-shirt and remove the articles after the semester.

The perpetuation of the division between “content” and “activity” causes harm to learning and prevents some of that innovative methodology everyone says they want. The idea that resources and “discussion” are separate gets passed down to new teachers going online, and they set up their classes that way, limiting their pedagogy.

So, note to LMS designers, including Moodle:

Stop adding internal “features” to your LMS based on webapps you see people using externally  (“blogs”, “scholar”), and start rethinking why teachers use those things. Think about the interactivity between “content” (or resource or page or presentation) and “activity” (the stuff that means servers have to talk to each other).

Wrap your head around the concepts, not just the tools, of teaching online.

The death of Google Talk chatback badge

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

The Google Talk chatback badge  has been important to a number of us faculty. We are frequently logged into Gmail anyway, and the badge let us put a bit of html on any webpage and students could click and IM with us without logging in to anything. Well, now it’s gone – Google has stopped supporting it and it doesn’t work anymore. They made no announcement (except a single post in a Google Group) and the badges still look like they work, but they don’t. I found out when Pilar Hernández, my esteemed colleague, had students screaming they couldn’t reach her.

I also have featured the badge on all my course pages and my home page for years. I recently made a tutorial on how to use them.

We can discuss why Google did this, and why Google doesn’t care, but I’m confident it’s because they don’t like the anonymity of it. They want everyone in Google Plus, which requires a Google account so they can track you. Given my concerns, I’m not comfortable forcing students into Google-dom just so they can chat with me.

Pilar and I spent all afternoon today trying alternatives.  Finding a replacement for Google chatback isn’t easy – it was a seamless and simple service. It wasn’t a shoutbox and it could be put anywhere, and on many different pages. Using this resource, we tried anything that was free. Meebo Messenger, Pilar’s backup, is also shutting down as of July 11,  so we had to go elsewhere.

Here’s what we tried. (Note: we discovered that none of the below worked with the Google Talk feature enabled – it’s obvious Google has gotten rid of that support also.)

  • Plugoo – commercial looking, big, didn’t work with some browsers
  • Olark – insisted I allow it to access all my Google contacts, and I had to email them to close the account
  • Zoho chat – can log in, but only puts shout box on one page
  • Chatbadge.com – when we tested it, we couldn’t get the messages to actually get to their destination – it seemed like the best but we couldn’t get it to work
  • Online Chat Centers – serious overkill, obviously for major helpdesks, had to log in directly and answer the phone, had a major New Delhi feel to it
  • Yahoo Messenger Pingbox  – not visible in all browsers, must log into Yahoo Messenger, doesn’t relay nickname properly

Our best choice was Plupper. It looked good, and has an open API. We were able to get it working by following the instructions for iChat  for Mac, and Miranda for PC.


https://www.google.com/jsapihttps://static.plupper.com/js/plupper.js
//

It does mean more work, since you have to have the IM client open and be logged in. Nowhere near as convenient for us, but just as convenient for students, which is what we needed.

When feedback isn’t seen as feedback

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

It’s taken me almost a year to figure out what might have gone wrong with last summer’s class. I need to take a look since this summer’s class starts Monday.

Last summer, thrilled at having only 40 students to tend to in an 8-week class, I had students post their historical theses in the forums instead of on a closed essay exam. I graded them according to a qualitative scale that translated into points, and made comments on each directly in the forums, which took a great deal of time.

I was at first so very happy with this method, having spent much time setting it up so beautifully. Then the class was over, and I got the evaluation, completed by only 16 students.
Ignoring the typical one-person-who-hates-everything-I-do student, 5 felt class expectations weren’t stated clearly. A surprising 6 didn’t find the Contribution Assessments helpful (these contain direct feedback for each and every student, in private), and though 14 said they read my comments on their own mini-essays in the forum, 2 thought I wasn’t even present and visible during class. Some comments on the open essays said:

“It would be helpful if we received more feedback on our short essays instead of a general comments so that we could improve our writing skills.”

“For someone who struggles with the weekly thesis maybe a little more information but since it was a summer class it was face paced. I enjoyed the class the grading was fair just needed a better understanding of the thesis but that could just be me.”

“I think more feedback on the essays is necessary. The only kind of feedback that I received was if something was wrong with my essay, but it would be nice to know the things that I’m doing well so that I could continue incorporating things into the essays that worked well.”

“I wish there was more direction for the writing assignments. Especially the final assessment.”

It has thus occurred to me that the continual, extensive feedback I gave several times a week on the posted essays was not seen as actual feedback or guidance by some of the students.

Keep in mind before you say I’m justing whining, that I give this evaluation every semester, and the overwhelming majority say my expectations are clear, the assignments are helpful, and the things they recommend tend to be things like “more content” or “less work”. Keep in mind also that my public comments on their essays were very specific, but kind and designed not to embarrass anyone. I also marked some of them with a bold For Everyone tag in the subject line, to provide more general comments at the same time. I thought this was brilliant — evidently not so much.

I can’t help but wonder whether doing closed essay grading instead, even if I said the exact same thing on each essay, would have led to a different result. Is it possible that forum postings from the instructor aren’t seen as feedback in the same way we view a private comment on a quiz?

So for the class that starts Monday, I have put the essays back into a standard, private, midterm and final exam format, with (as usual) the practice in the forums. We’ll see what happens.

Some interesting places to meet in real time

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

We’ve been working at finding places for synchronous meetings of various kinds for the POT Certificate Class. Sure, we can do the usual things, like meet up in Collaborate/Elluminate (we have installations at several of our jobs), but we kinda like free and we kinda like different so lately we’ve been looking at:

Web conferencing or video/audio conversation

Google Plus hangouts

The advantage is that many people already are in Google for something, and it’s pretty easy to find Plus now, and everyone can now access it since it’s out of alpha stage. Great video and audio quality, and the camera can automatically shift to whoever is speaking, putting them in the main frame.  But the maximum is 10 for talking – anyone after 10 can only watch. We liked it especially for quick meetings, kind of like Google Talk with video. One interesting thing is that if it’s public, anyone may drop by. The “with extras” option slows down the system, but lets you add viewing a YouTube together (this didn’t always work) or embedding a collaborative Google Doc, which would make presentations possible.

Big Marker

Kind of like Collaborate Lite, this one let us be on camera with microphones, but we had to have headsets upon entering the room or we got awful audio feedback. We only had four cameras on at once, but quality was good. All panels (participants, individual cameras, whiteboard) were in separate frames that could be resized. A presentation ppt could be loaded, and the presenter could zoom in or mark on it with simple drawing tools (line, box). Only one person could present at a time, and a newly uploaded presentation replaced the old one. Sessions cannot be archived with a free account.

Facebook HOOT

We began with just Facebook group chat, which is only text chat, but then decided to try this. Hoot is an FB application that you add, and the idea is to allow students to meet up together with video and audio. We tried it with five or six people, and as we were talking the creator of the app came in and spoke with us. Spooky but cool. Created by students for students.

Second Life

Here you need a “place” in SL to meet, so it’s like Collaborate only in that sense, and there are colleges and various organizations that will let you use their space. Audio is kind of new, and the application is pretty heavy (Cris Crissman pointed me to a different viewer, called Phoenix, that worked better than the new SL viewer). Learning curve is high, but the learning experience is rich because of the simulation of an actual meeting in a simulated space. Hard to explain unless you’ve done it.

Skype group video calling

For this, one person in the group must have a Pro account.

Alternate formats for “talking” while working together

Slideshare (Zipcast)

The idea here is that the presenter schedule a session where s/he can show him/herself on video and audio while touring through a slideshare slideshow, and you can see who is attending with their icons, and they can text chat during the session. Looks like you need a Pro account to do audio conferencing.

Inside a Google Doc

We meet inside a Google Doc just by putting some text in a Doc, then making it public and letting everyone know the URL. No audio, but real time edits and chat once you open the side window, plus you can annotate. If you were logged in to Google, sometimes it would still show you in the room as Anonymous, which was annoying. The other problem is that the synchronous chat isn’t saved. But it was a great way to create a document in real time.

I’ve heard Etherpad is good for this too, but it’s been bought by Google anyway; Crocodoc is also good for annotating together.

Hall.com

We recently also tried hall.com, which sets up a room where you can do polls, to do lists, and instant message chat — it seemed to work very well.

MindMeister Brainstorming

Lets you text chat while you create a mind map together.

Qikpad

Like Google docs, but better in a way because you can change your name  from anonymous instantly, and everyone’s contributions are instantly highlighted in a different color.

Shut up and collaborate

You don’t always need to be able to see and/or hear and/or text chat with each other — sometimes you just need to work at the same time. The collaborative documents can do this, and so can:

Stroome

Video collaboration, but we haven’t tried it in real time, though it says it can. 500 MB free. Lets you add clips, transitions, do cuts, etc. A little slow in rendering. Another recent option is wevideo, which we’ll try also, although it only lets 5 people work on one project in its free version.

Prezi Meeting

We haven’t yet tried it, but you can meet in Prezi to collaborate on making a presentation. Icons represent each participant, and move around showing who’s editing what.

 Watch a video together

Not quite ready for prime time, or at least not any better than putting a link in a chat and telling people to go watch.

We tried YouTube itself, which now has a link in the Share options that sets up a Google hangout for watching — we have tried to watch videos together in Google Hangout and it doesn’t usually work. We often all get bounced to a generic YouTube page instead of whatever the participant is trying to load in.

We also tried Chill.com (you have to use Facebook for this), and Synchtube, which didn’t really. We were all able to watch the same video, but speed varied widely. One of our members called it “Asynchtube”. Watchittoo.com made you pay.

 

Your question: where and when are you guys testing all this? more in the next post!

My question: What else should we check out?

 

Should “discussion” be separate?

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

This question goes way back to the first online class I ever saw demonstrated. The instructor, instead of using our one and only technology (Webboard) as a separate discussion, had embedded her lecture and instructions into the lead post for each week. And at the time (1998) I thought, “oh wow! the whole class is inside the discussion! This is great.”.

But I didn’t do it. Blackboard encourages you to put the discussion board in separate area, and even now that you can make a separate discussion forum for each unit, people still put discussion all together as one course menu item. In Moodle, I have a separate, nested discussion board (simple format) for each week/topic.

In my struggle to determine whether it’s a good idea to switch from forum post/reply to blog/comment format for clases with students, I have assumed that I would continue to integrate discussion as I do now, by week. But in my post about using One Blog, Brandon Davis-Shannon commented on his own difficulties with the format, and noted greater depth in the Blackboard forum than on blogs with comments. It occurred to me this might be because if the whole thing was together, students would feel less  awkward posting on a previous topic.

But we all acknowledge it depends on how it’s designed, and what (pedagogically speaking) we’re looking for.

So I created a Google Doc and invited Brandon to help create a chart showing some of the options, and here’s what we’ve done so far:

One big forum Weekly/topical forums One big blog Individual blogs
Advantages
  • May reward students posting on previous topics, deepening conversation, especially if design of the discussion encourages them to do so
  • Easy to use
  • Ties discussion to one topic, prevents tangents
  • Organizes posts and replies easily
  • Combines course info and activities in one place
  • Easy to track student activity
  • Easy for students to keep up with peers’ work
  • Requires a single log-in to participate
  • Possible feeling of collective student ownership of class blog.
  • Student ownership of their own learning space
  • Acquisition of some “just in time” technical skills within the context of actual use
  • Aggregating blogs can pull whole class together
Disadvantages
  • Artificially separates discussion and interactivity from the presented or informational content of the class
  • May overwhelm students with number of topics, as class continues.
  • Format doesn’t encourage students to go back to a previous topic, leading to a more superficial discussion.
  • Student ownership is not individual
  • Format may lead student posts to be lost in the shuffle
  • Blog may disappear if instructor takes it down, loses account, etc[a].
  • Unless commenting takes place on an aggregated blog (thus removing ownership advantage), the inconvenience of commenting on different blogs may be a problem
  • Diffuses the conversation too much
  • Discourages return to previous topics because of the nature of blog posting
  • Tends to require multiple log-ins to participate in commenting unless single system use (for example, Discus)
Pedagogy May be best suited for:

  • classes where themes run throughout
  • assignments that allow students to participate in several topics at once
  • pedagogies that want to place the information and content directly into the forum to emphasize discussion
 May be best suited for:

  • topics that need to be separate
  • assignments where everyone has a similar task, such as posting a particular link
  • classes where topics have a definite progression or need to move on
  • pedagogies that want to place the information and content directly into the forum to emphasize discussion
 May be best suited for:

  • keeping the class at one main website or page
  • having students experience creation of one artifact with individual contributions
  • pedagogies emphasizing collective development of the class
  • situations where individual blogs may be of concern for any reason
 May be best suited for:

  • student ownership of their work
  • pedagogies that encourage student exploration and development of their own topics or focus
  • if the instructor has a blog also and content is aggregated, embeds instructor’s content into class
  • a course with centralized complementary activities
Variations
  • All class materials can be available as posts
  • Can choose between threaded and nested in some applications
  • All class materials can be available as posts
  • Can choose between threaded and nested in some applications
 Theme (Layout?) Theme (Layout?)

Maybe this can help us make decisions on which discussion format is best for a particular class.

Class design: is One Blog the middle ground?

Lisa M Lane 6 Comments

I have now been a student in three separate classes where I ran my own blog to do the class assignments (CCK08, EC&I831 and ds106).  My classes for students are all designed with an LMS-based forum, within which outcomes have been achieved well thus far (I implemented the basic format in 2009).

So now, as I consider departing from an LMS for at least one of my classes for spring, the question is: should I have each student create his/her own blog, then aggregate them, and have them comment on each others’ blogs for discussion? That’s been the model in all three classes I’ve taken, and is the model for Pedagogy First!, where we’ve been using 90 individual blogs for the POT Certificate Class, aggregated to one central website.

But is this the best way for my own classes?

In a more typical online class, discussion takes place in a forum. This keeps things focused and in one place. People are used to forums. All the classes I’ve seen with distributed activities instead of forums have students begging for a forum, whether it’s a threaded forum in an LMS, a Google group, or a Ning. People want a central place to talk, and an aggregated blog made of up all their disparate posts can become just an information center, not a coffee house.

My brilliant colleague Jim Sullivan teaches English composition using a class blog. Students are all authors on it, and they blog there, not on their own blogs. We’ve discussed this many times, and I’ve rejected it because students don’t control their own space. I think they should, but I’m aware that the idea of helping hundreds of students with their technical problems has been a major hurdle to moving ahead. Now it occurs to me that Jim’s approach may be the pedagogically middle ground rather than just easier and more convenient for me (I like pedagogical middle grounds).

A traditional forum in an LMS is set in its pattern and closed in its format (once the class is over, you usually can’t access it). Having everyone create their own blog lets students have their own permanent space, but really doesn’t encourage discussion (as I’ve discovered running Pedagogy First!). Is the One Blog approach the middle ground?

Is it open and available?

It can be open and as loose as I want, and since I run my own WordPress I can promise it will stay open (Jim runs his own Typepad).

Is there a sense of student ownership?

While students don’t run their own space, students may feel that the One Blog is their space collectively, rather than individually (a classroom they can help create). This could subconsciously create a feeling of community.

Does it provide a good place for discussion?

Yes — not as much as a traditional forum, but more than individual blogs, because it is in one place and everyone is signed in just once, rather than being a guest on other people’s blogs. Plus, WordPress comments are nested. I have searched long and hard and have been unable to find forum software that is free, nests the comments so you can see which comments reply to which, and will tolerate multimedia.

Isn’t Ning a middle ground?

Ning is a social networking platform, a damned good one (nested! multimedia!), but to use it for free you have to advertise for Pearson. That isn’t middle ground — if there’s any advertising in my class at all (and I think there shouldn’t be) it should be incidental, not deliberate and appearing as if I am a spokesperson sponsoring a product (in many ways, this includes Blackboard and Moodle). And I don’t have time right now to figure out how to use an open source social networking platform (such as Oxwall) on my own service.

Although until now I’ve only used blogging for class as a student, I do use the blog platforms for my History 103 and History 104 at San Elijo. They’re not actually blogging on these (in terms of reflection or graded items), but rather posting theses for papers they turn in, and working together to create collections for class presentations. I could start by expanding this set-up into the One Blog format.

Sooooo…..

what am I not thinking of here as I make this decision?

 

Lab Day!

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Over the last few years of developing a technique I’m happy with in discussion forums (see Discussion Goodness from 2009), I’ve also been experimenting with something similar in the classroom at San Elijo. I’ve done it for three semesters now, and I’m happy with it too.

                 Image by permission and copyrighted Lisa M Lane 2011

The idea is that every two weeks, we have “Lab Day”. On that day, everyone who has a laptop has to bring one (a smartphone is OK, just not as good for searching images), and Media Services brings me a batch of old clunker PCs without batteries for everyone else. There are cords all over the floor, and students arranged in small groups.

The task, during our 75 minute class, is to create a collection of three primary sources related to that week’s era, then develop athesis and present it to the class with the evidence. All work is posted on the class website.

Students search the web for primary sources related to, say, the French Revolution. They have to be sure that they really are primary sources (not a drawing of a guillotine from 1947), and the sources can be visual or textual (I usually prefer visual). They post them with citations and create a thesis for which their sources are evidence.

The class website (here’s the one from last spring)  is on a WordPress platform, and the students have basic accounts. During the semester, they work on the website in two ways: by posting their homework thesis every Monday (after reading the textbook chapter) and by creating these source collections on Lab Day. I use several plugins to make it easy for students to post the media they find (mostly plugins that create a toolbar for a comment, since they’re all posting as comments).   My student Nick asked me to add a “Like” button so they could rate each others’ theses, so I did that too.

Each group has their own space to work (these are Categories in WordPress), and they use comments so that all their sources appear on the same page.

At the beginning of the semester, each group just collects three sources, and talks about how they related to each other at the end of the period. Since it’s early, I often create topics for them (i.e. “find portrait paintings from the 18th century” for Group 1, and “find examples of residential architecture during the Enlightenment” for Group 2). But as the class progresses, we move from more factual discussions of sources into interpretations and theses. Near the end of the semester, they are able to analyze the sources to say something meaningful as a historical theme, with examples from many eras.

Near the end of the period, the group s present (I let them decide if they want a spokesperson or the whole group to come up — interestingly, about 80% of the time the entire group stands up front together).  We have a projector that shows the website on the front screen s they present. Again, after the first time (when things are very new and strange), six groups of students can manage all this during one class period.

What’s interesting is that, as with my online classes, the students have some freedom to select the sources they want, so the focus of the presentation often reflects the interest of group members. As we get into broader theses, some groups develop a “specialty area” (say, war propaganda or women’s fashions). I also notice that there are hardly any absences on Lab Day! Students from home log in with TinyChat to talk to their group and participate because they don’t want to miss it. This is even though Lab Day is not graded directly, but rather just counts as part of Contribution.

The benefits of the exercise are several. The main one is affective: students enjoy working in groups and finding things on the internet, and they like having a self-contained class session where everything is immediate. Another benefit is that they get comfortable presenting early on – sharing becomes second-nature instead of something scary. They also get practice with the central historical skills (also our Student Learning Outcomes) of identifying primary sources, developing a historical thesis, and using the evidence to support the thesis. And they do it an environment that is quickly seen as non-threatening (I evaluate sometimes, we have peer evaluations sometimes, and sometimes we just do what we do). I can also provide in-person help as I walk around, with the website, with finding sources, with identifying sources, with whatever.

The drawbacks? I can’t really think of any, except when the network goes down or the technology gets funky. Or when there aren’t enough devices. But, in an emergency, we can do something similar with images from our textbook, or from collections I can bring up on the screen. It’s just not as cool that way.

A funny thing happened on the way to the…

Lisa M Lane 8 Comments

We don’t have a forum at our POT Certificate Class SMOOC (Small-to-Medium Open Online Class). Nor a Google Group (though that’s been suggested and may appear), nor a Moodle forum, nor a Ning.

When I took EC&I 831 from Alec Couros last fall, I felt we needed a forum, and he and I looked for one we liked, but nothing we found had the particular combination we wanted (no ads, free, nested comments and the ability to post multimedia), so we gave it up. On his current page for this semester, he’s listed many types of communication, but not a forum.

And now I notice that the Change MOOC, co-hosted by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, has a forum, but it’s kinda awkward. Not like a full-featured thing at all. On the main page, there are three Participating links for blogs, two for the newsletter, one for the backchannel, and one for threads. The class starts tomorrow and there are three posts for a class of hundreds.

And yet, all my college history classes feature forums as the heart of the action. I couldn’t do without them.

So why no forums for these classes? I think because the idea of distributed communication has become something we’re all taking seriously.

If we’re going to focus on the wonders of learning on the web as our topic, it makes sense that our participants should be communicating there rather than in a central location. We not only want them communicating via blogs, wikis and Facebook, but we also want them creating their own places and spaces (which is why the potcert11 class may yet have a Google Group, because the participants may be creating it — and they’re starting the Twitter thing, not me).

chart
From Rick Schwier’s Pursuing the elusive metaphor
of community in e-learning environments

I also think there’s more staying power to a distributed community. If you have one space, as we all know from using learning management systems, the course seems finite. Even if the space is available after the class is over, the feeling is still that the class is over. But if the conversation is distributed (our class has a very active Facebook group, which surprised the heck out me), there’s a feeling of perpetuity. The river continues and you step in and out when you wish.

As Rick Schwier has noted, informal communities have higher levels of engagement over time. I wonder whether de-emphasizing a formal location for conversation makes these classes lean more toward informal learning, even though they are organized as classes, with set timeframes.

So come on, hit me with the research. Do distributed communities last longer? Are we right to “force” them instead of offering a rich place for a single discussion?

Trouble in Diigo-land

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

My students have been searching for primary sources for weekly discussion, and I have a small collection of websites that have them. So I put those sites in Diigo, tagged them by class (i.e. “hist104resources”) then used the rss feed from my account to post them in an Remote RSS block in Moodle.

No problem.

But a couple of weeks ago I decided to offer extra credit if students found similar sites full of sources, and posted them in Diigo. The I would take the public feed of all bookmarks tagged “hist104resources”, and the Moodle block would show everyone’s contributions.

My policy is if I’m trying something new, it’s for extra credit, in case it doesn’t work.

It didn’t work.

it should look like this

Two students tried right away, in two different classes. They found sites, bookmarked them, tagged them “hist104resources” and “hist111resources”. They never showed up in the Moodle RSS block. They also didn’t show up in a search for either tag at the Diigo website (I saved 10 bookmarks with the tag hist104resources – the site shows one).The students were frustrated. So was I.

So I read up a bit at the Diigo forums, and the workaround seemed to be to form a group, except that folks said that groups plus tags don’t work. I tried it, with a group “mcchistory” then using the tags. Pasted the rss feed. No go.

So I made three groups, one for each class. Forget the tags, students, just share to the Hist111 group or the Hist104 group.

This seems to be working better, although my first student tried to resave her bookmarks and Diigo made me moderate them (without emailing me, and despite the settings that say anyone can join and add things, and despite me having “immediate alert” set – I wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t been writing this blog post).

We’ll see how it goes but this seems bizarre to me. I’ve used Diigo for years (I switched from Delicious, though I have it set up to save there too). I love the annotation feature. But once I tried to turn the social bookmarking truly social, bad things happened. And no response to my @diigo tweets, either.

So Alexandra Pickett, who runs a class in teaching online at SUNY (which I didn’t know about and looks great judging from the website and bookmarks!), wondered why I was unhappy with Diigo. This is why. But her interest and success with it encourages me to give it another chance.

Virtual Attendance, Part II

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this Snowball is going out to pasture.

Virtual Attendance: “Here!”

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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