Category: Presentation

Lecture: recorded, zoomed, or what?

Lisa M Lane

The word “lecture” conjures an idealized image of students listening attentively as a professor relays knowledge. Almost all of the lectures I enjoyed at university were in this format, and when I began teaching I lectured this way too.

With this year’s quick and unexpected transition to online teaching, many professors assumed that online lecture meant reproducing what they do in class. Zoom.com was grateful for this assumption, even as they struggled to accommodate the massive numbers holding live lectures. Almost immediately, however, there were complaints and problems.

Professors whined that students weren’t paying attention, or didn’t want to turn on their cameras. They couldn’t see the facial expressions and body language indicating comprehension (or lack thereof). Students complained about boring, wandering lectures, and they felt exposed. You can’t sit at the back in an online classroom, and they didn’t want thirty strangers to see the trailer they lived in. Many decided they would watch the recording instead.

The problem? Zoom provided the platform, but the pedagogy was still based in the classroom. This worked better for some professors than others. At our college, they let us choose before this fall whether we wanted our classes scheduled and in Zoom, or “online only” (meaning asynchronous, with no live meetings), or a mix. Many professors regretted their choice.  Those in Zoom wished they hadn’t, and those who chose asynchronous were sorry they’d done that.

For two decades, I’ve been pushing the idea that the technology should follow the pedagogy. Your preferred teaching method should dominate. In the rush, there had been no connection between a professor’s pedagogy and their choice of format.

So, assuming you lecture, what kind of lecturer are you?

Interactive lecturers count on student participation. They ask questions during lecture, or survey the mood, or set tasks for students during the lecture.

Interactive lecturers should consider live (synchronous) lecturing in Zoom or another webconferencing program. The live approach online, however, works best for the simple lecture, on one topic. Shortening lecture time by about 2/3 is also a good idea for live session lectures, but they can be immediately followed by breakout room activity.

Traditional lecturers are those who lecture to an audience, and don’t expect, need, or want the lecture to be interactive. They relay a lot of information, framed by their own interpretation from their professional experience.

Traditional lecturers should record these lectures, and students can view them in an asynchronous way. Students particularly appreciate recorded lectures when the topic is complex, so they can go back and review without being on the spot.

Online lecturers, long ago, were all using dial-up modems and there wasn’t much bandwidth. A lecture quickly became a typed out version of ones lecture notes. As bandwidth expanded, these written lectures could be enhanced with images, then audio, then video. Written lectures can be more like reading, or they can be multi-media experiences, but they’re based on the web page or blog. They may include recorded mini-lectures. Like traditional lectures, they tend to be asynchronous.

So, planning to offer a 90-minute lecture on the historiography of the fall of ancient Rome? Go ahead, but considering recording it with images or video clips rather than doing it live. Want to lecture on solving a quadratic equation, using a whiteboard and asking students to help as you go? Consider a live lecture. Already wrote a great article that covers everything that would be in this week’s lecture? Record your voice reading it, and add some pictures or video clips.

But we don’t all have a choice. Have you been told you have to fill 75 minutes of scheduled class time? Consider creating interactive lectures and activities that require working together. Or have students view a recorded lecture, then come to the synchronous class to work out problems or just do their homework together. I would consider this a flipped online classroom, a model that understands that absorbing information may be best done on ones own but applying it should be done together.

So as we approach spring, let’s consider.

A free textbook experiment

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

For some time, I have been creating free textbooks for students. In my online classes, these take the form of a pdf file, containing edited selections from Wikipedia followed by my own edited selection of primary sources.

In online classes, students rarely print the book, although they are invited to if they wish. In on-site classes, printing is an issue. We reference the book frequently in class, and they read aloud from documents. The continual searching required by an e-book or online version wastes a lot of time compared to “see page 76”.

Few students want to print the textbook on their printer or use the library printer, because it’s about 170 sides of print. Since they do not understand the printer interface on computers, when they do obediently print the book themselves it comes out as 170 single-sided pages on 8.5 x 11 paper (that’s about A4 size). So over the past few years I’ve tried various things. The most successful has been having them bring the file to Staples or Office Depot with syllabus instructions of what to ask for.

When students asked why they must go to all this trouble, I explained. I could have the books printed by the on-campus bookstore. This is actually a corporate conglomerate, Follett, which in addition to enforcing copyright clearance that violates the TEACH Act, insists on marking the book up 26%. When I complained to Follett that I wrote it, they only printed it, and 26% was excessive, I was told that I can ask to receive my own percentage in royalties added into the price. They couldn’t see this made the problem worse, not better. Students nodded appreciatively when they understood I was trying to save them money. Then half got the book printed the first week, a quarter in the first few weeks after being reminded, and a quarter not at all.

Our college has promoted Open Educational Resources for some time. There is even a state-wide grant that faculty can get to adopt them. People like me should get these grants, but can’t for two reasons. First, the grants are for adopting OERs, not creating them. This is despite the fact that it takes over a hundred hours to create a resource, and about six to select one from the very few on offer. Second, the grants are only available to those who can demonstrate a savings over the previous semester, meaning those of us who have been offering free textbooks for years aren’t eligible.

So last term, given all these limitations and the execrable quality of open access textbooks in History, I asked the department for some printing funds. Since I teach so many classes online, I do not use much printing money each term. With this money I was able to have printed enough textbooks for the whole class (much easier in a time of declining enrollments). I did it half size and spiral bound, making a rather attractive if thick booklet.

(The “15th edition” gives you an idea of how long I’ve been creating these.)

I handed them out the second day of class, and told them to feel free to highlight or write in them. I told them what I had done and why, and that essentially these were paid for by taxpayer dollars. When I handed them out, they accepted them in an entirely different way than a handout or assignment. Each student took the booklet from me carefully, placing it on their desk. Some squared the corners with the desk. They turned the pages somewhat gingerly.

This pattern, of treating the book as a gift rather than a task continued through the semester. It was rather as if I’d given them their own chemistry set. After 12 weeks, I noticed that many of the booklets were still in mint condition.

Now we know that students don’t tend to highlight and take notes in their books anymore, unless it’s part of a specific assignment or one makes a point of insisting on it. At the end of the term, only two or three had been marked in. The rest looked perfect. None were grubby or torn. So I asked if anyone might be willing to turn in their book to pass on to the next group of students. Over half did so.

Although it may have been just a very considerate class of students, I’d like to think there’s something else at work here. I had been concerned about doing this because I thought the book would be devalued, since they hadn’t paid for it. But the opposite happened. Giving them the book seemed to tap into the affective domain. They cared that I gave it to them. They seemed to see it as a sign of me caring about them. And they cared for the object. The attitude was such that if there was no department money, I might well pay for doing it myself. I’m certainly going to do it again this term.

 

 

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.

Fun with YouTube: the pure embed

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

I like using YouTube clips for my classes, but I don’t like the clutter: links to other videos when it’s done playing, the title showing at the top, low quality. So I play with the embed code:

//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yodnppdZh2M?rel=0&vq=hd720&showinfo=0
//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yodnppdZh2M?rel=0&vq=hd720&showinfo=0

See what I’ve added after the video code, ending with the ?
rel=0 > YouTube adds this when you deselect the “show related videos” on the embed code

vq=hd720 > means to show it in maximum resolution or HQ if it has it

showinfo=0 > to get rid of the title showing at the top of the clip

That’s better.

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.

Adventures in Accessibility: Part I

Lisa M Lane

Yes, it’s a pain. Yes, it stifles our creativity. No, it doesn’t make sense to pretend that we can make every online learning artifact accessible to everyone with any type of disability, be it physical, cognitive, emotional, socio-economic, or educational. But we do it anyway. Not because we believe in the dogmatic, administrative, litigation-phobic approaches of universal design, but because it’s cool to do it, when we can.

So I’m taking a closer look at some of my multimedia, to see what can be made more accessible to people with certain types of issues, or, better, to be made more interesting and comprehensible to all students.

The first discovery: YouTube’s captioning is so much better than it used to be! Log in. Upload your video. Wait overnight (or sometimes just a few hours). You can even set the video to private. YouTube will create captions as best it can. Select the cc button, and see the captions in a sidebar. Click edit and edit them. You can set the video to stop running when you type.

Oh, you say you have a transcript? Perfect. Just upload your video and select the option to transcribe instead. Paste in the transcript. YouTube will set up the timings as best it can.

youtubecaptions

Sliders are now available to move the caption around on the clip. You can even see the audio waveform below to help. You can insert caption bits. Then save.

But wait, it gets better. Don’t like YouTube? Want to serve your video elsewhere. Download the captions using the actions menu (.srt format is pretty standard). Then you can upload it somewhere like Vimeo or Dailymotion, which has better video quality and no ads.

The Value of Proximity

Lisa M Lane

Togetherness is a good thing.

It’s pretty clear, even in recent studies, that we want to present information to students in “multiple modalities” (text, graphics, video). But there have been a few studies discussing the placement of “learning objects” (text, video, images) on a webpage, and how that placement relates to learning. The results of a 10-year study at UCSB by Richard Mayer and colleagues focused on how best to use audio, text, video and other media elements (1) . They discovered that how media elements are handled on the screen impacts learning.

Improved learning resulted from adding graphics to text, and from adding text to graphics. But “[t]he trick is to use illustrations that are congruent with the instructional message”, rather than for effect or entertainment.
Interestingly, a conversational tone and the use of an “agent” (a talking head video or animated cartoon), even just the voice, also helped learning.

Explaining graphics with audio improved learning also. But too much was overload. Audio and text explaining a graphic decreased learning, and any gratuitous or dramatic elements added only to get attention caused distraction and also decreased learning.

Putting the issue of relevancy aside for a moment (obviously the text and graphics should both be trying to further the same instructional goal), I think the important issue is proximity. If there is a graph at the top of the page, but the graph is explained with text three paragraphs later, I don’t think it will help.

Proximity is critical, because the relationship between objects that may be obvious to instructors may not be obvious to students.

In my online lectures, I have always put illustrative images next to the appropriate text. I remember in the late 90s repeatedly looking up a cheat sheet my mentor, Kathleen Rippberger, made showing me how to write HTML to wrap text around an image (thank you, HTML). Over time, I came to embed videos, then YouTube videos, also within the lecture page (thank you, embed code). This year, I began embedding the primary sources right into the lecture (thank you, iframe).

The desire to keep things together even caused me to explore putting a lecture and the corresponding discussion together on the same page, which I could do using iframes in Moodle. But the effect is still not seamless, and it looks awkward on mobile devices.

lecdisctogether

If we extend the principle of proximity to the defaults on a typical Learning Management system, however, we will be disappointed. I despair as I look at Blackboard’s default menu, with everything separated: “course materials” here, discussion forum there, tests way over there. It was this problem that led our instructors to create the main page as an interactive syllabus. But even there, the page is a list of links:

week1links

The goal of proximity explains why so many instructors try various forms of “modules” and “units”, which seem to me like online versions of the paper packets we used to use in grade school.

Proximity thinking has come a little late to online education, but it needs a place at the table. The delay has been caused by not only the LMS, but by all the reasons the LMS is popular, including deceptive plug-and-play functionality and ongoing difficulty creating structured learning experiences if you aren’t a web-head. Time to consider proximity as its own design concept, within the LMS if necessary.

(1) Ruth Clark, Six Principles of Effective e-Learning: What Works and Why, Learning Solutions Magazine (2002)

Another voice for history

Lisa M Lane

To take students through the text of a historical document, I downloaded a sample UK voice called Peter from Infovox (free for 30 days, then $20 for the one voice). It works through my Mac’s Universal Access system. It’s quite awkward to have it read just text, since even at high-threshold settings it wants to read aloud all the computer commands and window changes. By putting the Magna Carta into a TextEdit document and recording with Snapz Pro, I did this:

I also tried a UK male voice at Cepstral but I couldn’t get it to behave properly.

This approach might be more effective with bouncing ball or highlighting, but I’m not sure.

Animated lecture in context

Lisa M Lane

What if I could give a bit of history lecture “on location”?

Continuing with looking at animation, I downloaded Tellagami  (which I first read about on Greg Kulowiec’s blog) to my iPod Touch and was able to do this:

It saves as mp4 to the Tellegami website, and their Share button gives embed code. Or I suppose one could download it using one of those sneaky browser extensions.

The limitations were that I had to upload photos to the iPod, and that the audio was a little dicey – I had to make sure the Touch was a couple of feet away from me to not get static. Oh, and it’s limited to 30 seconds!

I don’t have an iPad so it hadn’t occurred to me to look at apps, but now I will.

And next I hope to borrow an iPad to try Explain Everything, the other app from Greg’s post.

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.

Presence through video and Voki

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Instructor presence, though it can be defined more technically, is a perception that the instructor is there and available to the student during a class. Lately, in addition to my weekly summaries and guidance in the discussion forums, plus announcements and messages with individual students, I’ve also been using two other elements: an introductory video at the beginning of class, and a Voki introduction to each week.

Here’s the introductory video for this coming summer:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/i3Oyg-GDmpY?rel=0

Here’s video on how I create my weekly Voki:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nPd7TklVLRg?rel=0&vq=hd720

While both are clearly presentations rather than interactivity, I think the spontaneity is important in encouraging students to see me as a real person at the “other end” of the class. That’s why I prefer cheap and easy methods like these (webcam and iMovie for the video, free Voki for the animation) rather than more “professional” means.

Ending the Half-Assed Textbook Adoption

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

Next semester I am completely textbook-free, having dropped even the historical atlas so I can do other cool things with my new Honors class. My Western Civ text is a compilation of my online lectures, which I’m editing over break. Everything else is Wikipedia “context reading” and my extensive online written lectures. All else is student discovery, posting, interaction, practice, etc.

In the meantime, I receive emails from the bookstore demanding my book orders. The assumption is that I must order books. Also in my email is notification of a subcommittee meeting on campus about affordable textbooks and what to do about those high prices.

Is the textbook era over? No. If I loved a book, if I used every page, if I followed a textbook slavishly in my class, I’d order that book.

What’s over is the era of the half-assed textbook adoption. The classes where the prof has students buy a whole hardback textbook but only use half of it, or only assigns a few chapters, or has students read “selections” from it. We can’t, in good conscience, do that when textbooks are so expensive and bookstores just can’t find that previous edition, or sell it used at exorbinant prices.

I didn’t intentionally dump them all, you know. I looked carefully for a book, as I noted in last month’s post.

But this semester I used a new book in my early Western Civ, an on-site class. It has good sources and its own methodology, which corresponded with mine — collecting primary sources and analyzing them together instead of engaging in narrative. (Narrative, I’ve decided, is Wikipedia’s job, or mine if I have a particularly good story to tell.) And we used this book, and they did homework from it, and they mined it for documents on open-book quizzes.

But I wasn’t really into the book. I didn’t love it, I didn’t quote it, and we only examined its contents intensively in class a few times. So why did they have to pay $80+ for it? Not good enough.

So go ahead and adopt that textbook. But do it wholeheartedly, because it’s the basis of your class. Because it fits so well with your pedagogy you smile when you open it. Because you know that $150 for the new edition is totally worth it, since it gives your students such an excellent educational experience.

Just don’t go half-assed.

Short lecture introductions

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

This post has too much embedded media, so you might have to reload the page — just experimenting!

In an effort to increase my presence in the class and personalize my lectures so they don’t seem like a textbook, I recorded short talking-head videos for each lecture in History 111. This took me one full day. My process was:

Opened iMovie and recorded each video, talking while I looked at a printout of each lecture to make sure I covered everything.

Exported as .mov with H264 video and AAC audio (high quality and YouTube’s preferred format).

Uploaded to YouTube.

I had access to captioning services through a grant at MiraCosta, so I re-exported the audio only from each .mov and sent them in to be captioned. BUT if I hadn’t had this service I would have used the captions YouTube creates (they appear in a few hours), downloaded them, edited them, then uploaded again. I didn’t put it in the video, but disabling the Machine Transcription can make sure it plays your version.

[iframe width=”350″ height=”267″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_FcsqxXmFc8?rel=0″]
Uploading a prepared caption transcript		 [iframe width=”350″ height=”267″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/7nApHriWjjY?rel=0″]
Using YouTube’s captioning and editing it

Then I used the YouTube embed code to put these in my lectures.

And here they are:

[iframe src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mtVDDUkNsig?rel=0″ width=”240″ height=”192″]
Reconstruction		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Hqfx50JnDvw?rel=0″]
The West		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/72CZlRx3NOc?rel=0″]
Incorporation & Immigration		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IDDntrx79u8?rel=0″]
Silver & Empire
[iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8WMAZsqcZ8U?rel=0″]
Progressivism		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YP-qufoEuIs?rel=0″]
The Great War		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/31IPRCT1rvQ?rel=0″]
The Twenties		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DQF1PQxzLkg?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″]
The Great Depression
[iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3n7-QMF1JQ8?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″]
World War II		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/juUz0znjqKk?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″]
The Cold War		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QHADQls4s6A?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″]
The Fifties		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Vs5JaByHDqs?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″]
War & Activism
[iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/-AVrjFRHOXc?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″]
Inclusion & Exclusion		 [iframe width=”240″ height=”192″ src=”http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DUONX1kKEZM?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″]
Contemporary US

For the record, yes, I have problems seeing myself on film (much less so many photos of me in this post), but over time I’ve just gotten used to it. We once titled a workshop on making talking-head video “Get Over Yourself”, and that’s what I’ve done. 🙂

Edupirate Pete, he dance to de caption beat

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Edupirate Pete likes to share clips from motion pictures as examples in his US history class. YouTube doesn’t always have the exact clips he wants, so he rips them off DVDs using MactheRipper or Handbrake, selects the scenes using an old copy of Cinematize then uploads them to YouTube.

He wants to caption them to make them easier for all students to understand (yes, you may call it legal accessibility or Section 508, but Pete calls it universal design). Luckily, YouTube will try to machine caption for you. Sometimes.

And when it does the results are always interesting. Here’s a scene from The Seven Year Itch.

Pete downloads YouTube’s caption file, cleans it up, then uploads it again, and it works great. Then he embeds the clip in his webpage (or in Blackboard to hide it from prying eyes) and there is the clip, with captions.

But sometimes Goo-Tube figures out it’s a copyrighted motion picture. Interestingly, this happens to more obscure films. But recently, their way of dealing with this has to been forbid embedding and add advertising to any clips it decides contain copyrighted content.

This is unacceptable to Edupirate Pete. So he uploads his clip to Blip.tv or Vimeo instead, but they don’t have machine transcription. Since he’s already uploaded to YouTube anyway, he downloads the caption file, and cleans it up. Then he pastes the clean text into this free converter, which converts YouTube’s .sbv captions file to the .srt format everyone else uses. He opens the URL of his Blip.tv or Vimeo movie clip into Overstream.com, then pastes in the .srt format he got from the converter, and it creates a very nice overlay of captions onto the original file, and gives him the embed code.

Here’s a clip from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which Goo-Tube decided was a copyright problem although The Seven Year Itch was not.

http://www.overstream.net/swf/player/oplx?oid=ucr5r3nblomp&noplay=1

Boom chicka boom. Thanks, Edupirate Pete!

Glogster & Moodle: good idea, poor execution

Lisa M Lane

For extra credit in my online classes, I usually have students make a slideshow detailing a historical theme they’ve created.

Don’t tell, shhhhh, but: I despise slideshows. They take too long to grade, because they are hard to skim. Worse than audio.

All on one page, that’s my ticket.

So students in my 8-week summer Western Civ class asked for some extra credit, and one mentioned a poster (he also mentioned slideshow, but I’m ignoring that). So I went to Glogster, which I’ve never used for any sort of assignment, and created one as an example.

Then came the embed horror. Since speed is my goal, I want these suckers embedded firmly in a simple forum post, so they’re all one one screen and can be marked easily with a ratings drop-down.

Well, Glogster’s embed code sucks, and Moodle’s forum helpfully strips it to completely useless. And if you used Glogster’s “embed this poster” embed code instead (which is iframes-based), Moodle’s forum strips it all. So I tried to include special instructions as part of the extra credit assignment itself:

Then I looked at my cleverly embeded poster, and it wasn’t there. My own Firefox said I needed a plugin, but my Shockwave Flash is up to date. I looked and Safari sees the embed just fine. Naturally, I was contacted by a student almost instantly saying they couldn’t see the sample poster. I worked on it all morning, and finally had to use this Moodle hack, which creates a database. Took about a dozen tries but now students should be able to do this:

Of course, in WordPress this isn’t an issue.

http://www.glogster.com/flash/flash_loader.swf?ver=1309172180

Adding cc to a lecture. Or is it a textbook?

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I am planning my first class without a textbook, which starts June 6. And I have just gone over my online lectures and finally added my Creative Commons license to them all (I hadn’t done the Western Civ or History of England, though it’s been on my To Do list for two years).

As I added these licenses to each lecture, I began to realize what a huge resource I’ve written (and recorded – they are all audio recorded and downloadable, which makes them hard to change).

Textbooks are also hard to change. People say, “you should write a textbook”. I say, “oh, no, I’ve already written all these lectures…”

All these screens, and so much of it is factual information combined with my interpretation. It’s a secondary source. It’s a textbook. All these lectures. I’ve written textbooks.

When I wrote these “lectures”, the audio feature was very trendy. Now a “lecture” means something different: a video on YouTube with a talking head, a screencast, or a Slideshare Slidecast (I’ve got lots of these too, from my on-site Western Civ).

This summer, I am getting rid of the textbook, so they can focus on my lectures for the information, then work on primary sources and constructing theses. So, I’ve already begun to turn the lectures into the textbook, just by shifting the weight.

If I go all the way, my lectures for every class could become the new textbook. So I could create new lectures that do what historians do. Not present factual information, but interpret, connect to the trends of today, bring up an issue in detail, or present some new research.

New pedagogy. The kind of stuff that keeps me going.

Eyejot in Moodle for quick video message

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Another take, Mr DeMille

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes even informal is too formal.

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.

Captions as input

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Not having cable TV at home, I tend to watch it during my almost daily slog on the treadmill at the YMCA. Some of the treadmill TVs have an interesting feature: they show captions until you plug in your earphones. Then the captioning disappears. The presumption must be that if you plug in earphones, you can hear, and therefore don’t need the captions.
Captioning is a talking point in accessibility discussions. It’s seen as necessary for those with hearing impairments, so they can read the audio content instead of hear it. But some faculty don’t want things captioned, since the point of the exercise might be to ONLY hear something (as in a language class). Although captioning is increasingly mandated by the government, I support faculty who have work for which captioning is inappropriate, and those who refuse to do manual captioning themselves because their institution won’t help with it.

But to me captioning is not about disability accommodation. It is simply another way of relaying the information, regardless of ability. While not being a very good listener, or very good at English, may not be a “disability”, in such cases captioning can provide better comprehension. Reading the captions while listening engages two parts of the brain and provides reinforcement. Seeing a visual representation next to text provides two inputs. Multiple inputs work. I did an experiment once where I put on period music, flashed period images on the screen, and lectured about the period all at the same time. Retention of the information was much better.

So I am annoyed by the treadmills that automatically turn off the captions. My Spanish is lousy, so if I’m watching a soccer game it helps to see the Spanish in print. If the gym is loud that day, or the audio track of the movie on TCM isn’t so hot, or the characters use accents or intonations my brain is too tired to translate while pretending I’m not walking for 2 miles, the captions are nice. It should be up to me to turn them on or off, using the remote control.

What I did at school today: CoolIris

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really Recording a Lecture

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

tools

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s my lecture.

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

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!

Videoconferencing and its impact

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments
class
Janice Stearns

Just read in Business Week that a recent study indicates that people tend to pay more attention to the personality than the content when viewing someone on a videoconferencing screen.

I have noticed this myself when I was on MCC’s Technology and Pedagogy committee. If I really wanted to get something accomplished, a particular agenda item or task, I became aware that I had to go up to Oceanside and attend in person. If I just wanted to participate, videoconferencing was fine. In fact, people would pay more attention to me. But they seemed not to pay as much attention to what I said.

The study abstract explains that this is because their brains were dealing with the mediation environment. Ben Levisohn of BW says:

The video attendees were twice as likely to base their evaluation of the meetings on the speaker rather than the content. They were also more likely to say the speaker was hard to follow. . . [O]ur brains gather data about people before turning to what they say. In person, we do this quickly. But speakers are harder to “read” on the screen, so we focus more on them.

While it’s fun to have ones own experience supported by current research, it means that videoconferencing is not a good way to be effective at a meeting, meaning a drive up to campus when I need to make an impact.

It may also have implications for our students when we use web video to present content. At the moment I’m only using it to introduce myself. But if I used it to lecture, would they get what I’m saying, or evaluate the lecture based on my personality, and learn very little?

My Dream Classroom: Historical Sensurround

Lisa M Lane 6 Comments

I’m not usually much of a dreamer, and I don’t want to get too wild here, but what I’d really like is multiple projections on every wall, and multiple audio speaker areas that can be separate or combined.

Right now, no matter how fancy, all media is focused at the front of the room. Best viewing is in rows facing the front, or theatre seating. This configuration, of course, supports old-style presentation.

Screens on each wall, with separate projectors, would allow a more immersive, less presentation-focused environment. If connected to computers, each area of the room could work independently. I imagine groups working on separate projects.

I imagine all four walls with images of an interior set in the historical timeframe. I could “decorate” the whole room to make it look like we’re in a Victorian study, for example. Or a Celtic hut. Or the Roman Senate. Heck, they could decorate the room.

This multimedia installation is round, not square,
but you get the general idea.

I could rotate images of artwork from the timeframe we’re working on, surrounding the students with the cultural artifacts of that time. For assessment, they could look around and choose which artifact or artwork they want to discuss on a test (right now I can only put up a few at a time, and more on one screen makes each one smaller).

Some screens could have text from a primary source. Audio could be music from the era, or speeches, or both. Whatever else the Net Gen may or may not be good at, I’ve proven in class they can intake multiple media sources simultaneously.

With this vision, it’s getting hard for me to design such environments on one screen, which takes up only 25% of one wall at the front. Students at the back are literally distant from the sources. They couldn’t be with Historical Sensurround. The environment would force involvement at some level of the brain.

And I’d love to recreate environments like this. Second Life settings in our First Life. Transient installation art. Just dreaming….

It’s All Amplified Online

Lisa M Lane

Ever heard the saying “the camera adds 10 pounds”? Or that alcohol intensifies your personality? It’s true of the online environment too: whatever you do, however you seem, it’s magnified online.

When you’re curt or impatient in an email, it comes off twice as curt and impatient as it would in a written memo. When you object to someone’s point of view in a post, it comes off twice as harsh. Irritated can be seen as angry. A casual remark can seem inappropriately off-hand. And when you’re being friendly, it can come across as very friendly, sometimes even loving, especially if the message is a lengthy one.

Email, they say, is for old people. That’s because the younger set often communicate in small bites, bits of info through txt messages or Facebook chat. They might not say who they are, start with “hello”, sign the email, etc. They aren’t trying to be rude, they just have trouble sometimes changing the communication style based on the format. But instructors can model by being quick and casual in IM or txt, and more formal through email. Discussion boards, depending on the assignment and parameters, may fall somewhere in between. The shorter the message, however, the more likely that unseemly magnification could occur.

This is important to remember in teaching online, and it’s one of the reasons that carefully crafting an online personality is so important. If I want my students to see me as professional, and I write pages or posts like I would write professionally, it will come across as stiff and stuffy. If I want to be approachable, I must be careful I don’t seem so nice that students think I’ll be there for them at 2 a.m.