I'll be teaching a class for NAU-Yavapai next month, "Technology and Human Values." All of the classes for this new university are hybrid format, and since this is an super-accelerated course conducted in five weeks, I'm structuring it so we address a new topic each week, five topics that allow students to investigate how technological changes are (or are not) influencing basic topics in humanities. We'll meet twice a week for two and a half hours, plus there will be considerable online learning as well. The college is being touted as a new type of university, addressing the needs of 21st century students.
That being the case, I've decided to go whole-hog on the engaged learner thing we've been discussing in school. I'd already decided not to use a textbook in favor of finding articles and other sources that address the most recent theories and events related to our topics. But now, building the source material is going to be a big part of the "online" part of the hybrid class. Each week, for each topic, students will have to find articles, blogs, Twitter feeds, discussion forums, videos, wikis or other online material to add to the class wiki, which I've created in response to this week's assignment. Each week's assignment will require students to find a variety of sources AND to write a short justification of why each source is credible and useful. I might have students evaluate each other's sources as well, perhaps a vote will determine which sources will be added to the class wiki, rather than just adding them all. I'm also setting up a "class notes" page on the class wiki, to create communal notes, and a class bulletin board for questions.
The NAU-Yavapai format, where I will have the students for a couple hours twice a week, as well as online, means I can take the time to ensure that each student has mastered all the various technological formats necessary to do this sort of work. I've already asked that the class be scheduled for a classroom with computers, so in week one all the students will establish Blogger, Twitter, Lino and Google accounts, set up a Google Reader and a Twitter feed on their blogs, etc. This way, I don't have to struggle with varying levels of technical knowledge or computer access. All the students know that their courses are hybrid, and are required to have adequate computer and Internet access to enroll.
I'm very curious to see how this works out. My classes have always been very free-form and open. I'd rather address what students want to talk about than to stick to a lesson plan. But I've never taught a class like this before, where the students will determine not only the conversations but produce the course materials as well. I have no idea how it will work out...
Friday, February 25, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
A couple of dispatches from the digital frontier
A couple weeks ago I had students in one class use stixy.com to post their weekly "muddiest point" assignment, in which they identify points in the class materials they'd like to discuss in class. I had set up weekly threads in Blackboard's discussion forum for this assignment, but when I started investigating online bulletin boards, I asked the students to try it out. Today in class I held a vote, asking the students which they preferred. The overwhelming choice was Stixy. The main reason given was the graphic nature of the program, making it easy to see other students' posts as a group, rather than as single posts. I did have one student who was unable to post to the class board, and I'm not sure why. So we're going to try it again this week, and see how it goes. I actually like Lino.com better, but since I started with Stixy, I'm going to stick with it in this class, to avoid bombarding the students with yet another system.
Another system I'm experimenting with is using Jing.com and Screencast.com to record video responses to my students' blogs. I find that especially in online classes where students don't get any face time with their instructor, they really respond well to a short video in which I talk to them about their blogs and explain how their grade was determined. I've gotten quite a bit of unsolicited positive feedback from students on this, including this message I received this morning.
I don't mean to toot my own horn on this, because I don't think it is my teaching or grading that is generating the praise but the formats that I'm using to communicate with students and deliver feedback. Jing is just so dead simple that it essentially disappears, and students get an experience that feels closer to a one-on-one conversation that even a F2F class can provide.
I just record myself commenting on each student's blog, while capturing whatever is on the computer screen. So I can alternate between the blog itself and the grading rubric to explain how I am evaluating the assignment. I can also demonstrate how, for instance, to add links to a Blogger.com blog, which is something that I require in their blog posts but which many students neglect in their first post. Here is the feedback that prompted the fulsome praise I posted above. (I don't think I'm violating any FERPA regulations here, since the student isn't identified except by first name and the link to his blog is never shown...)
Clearly I have to work on my "ums!"
There are some downsides to using Jing. One is the upload time. I have a pro account rather than the free one ($15 a year), and so I can save the files in more compact formats, but it still takes two to three minutes to upload each file to Screencast. I use that time to read the next blog to be graded, so it isn't wasted, but I'm not the most accomplished multi-tasker in the world and I find it a little stressful to be keeping track of one file while starting to work on the next.
The other downside is storage space. A free Screencast account offers 2 gigabites of storage, and I just about maxed that out with one semester's grading, even though I only used Jing videos for about half the assignments last fall. I've had to download each of those video files to store elsewhere, in order to have room to start saving new files for this semester. That takes a long time, since you have to download each file individually, and I have to find storage space elsewhere to keep them for my records. Removing them from Screencast also means that my fall students can no longer access the video, though I'm not sure if any of them would want to! I'm seeing that I'll have to get a pro Screencast account soon, and that's another $99 that either I or my division will have to come up with. Wouldn't it be great if Blackboard had a system to allow for video grading, or the college offered server space where students could access the videos?
Anyway, those are just a couple of recent experiences I've had with various tech experiments in class.
Another system I'm experimenting with is using Jing.com and Screencast.com to record video responses to my students' blogs. I find that especially in online classes where students don't get any face time with their instructor, they really respond well to a short video in which I talk to them about their blogs and explain how their grade was determined. I've gotten quite a bit of unsolicited positive feedback from students on this, including this message I received this morning.
Ms. Waldenberger,
So I just finished listening to your response and justification for grading my blog assignment #1.
I don't want to sound like a (pardon my french) kiss ass, but I think that everything about how this online class is being brought together is exciting, and really awesome. The voice thread response, and all the blog postings, I think is great way to get people involved, and still maintain that personal voice-to-voice contact.
Great Job!
So I just finished listening to your response and justification for grading my blog assignment #1.
I don't want to sound like a (pardon my french) kiss ass, but I think that everything about how this online class is being brought together is exciting, and really awesome. The voice thread response, and all the blog postings, I think is great way to get people involved, and still maintain that personal voice-to-voice contact.
Great Job!
I don't mean to toot my own horn on this, because I don't think it is my teaching or grading that is generating the praise but the formats that I'm using to communicate with students and deliver feedback. Jing is just so dead simple that it essentially disappears, and students get an experience that feels closer to a one-on-one conversation that even a F2F class can provide.
I just record myself commenting on each student's blog, while capturing whatever is on the computer screen. So I can alternate between the blog itself and the grading rubric to explain how I am evaluating the assignment. I can also demonstrate how, for instance, to add links to a Blogger.com blog, which is something that I require in their blog posts but which many students neglect in their first post. Here is the feedback that prompted the fulsome praise I posted above. (I don't think I'm violating any FERPA regulations here, since the student isn't identified except by first name and the link to his blog is never shown...)
Clearly I have to work on my "ums!"
There are some downsides to using Jing. One is the upload time. I have a pro account rather than the free one ($15 a year), and so I can save the files in more compact formats, but it still takes two to three minutes to upload each file to Screencast. I use that time to read the next blog to be graded, so it isn't wasted, but I'm not the most accomplished multi-tasker in the world and I find it a little stressful to be keeping track of one file while starting to work on the next.
The other downside is storage space. A free Screencast account offers 2 gigabites of storage, and I just about maxed that out with one semester's grading, even though I only used Jing videos for about half the assignments last fall. I've had to download each of those video files to store elsewhere, in order to have room to start saving new files for this semester. That takes a long time, since you have to download each file individually, and I have to find storage space elsewhere to keep them for my records. Removing them from Screencast also means that my fall students can no longer access the video, though I'm not sure if any of them would want to! I'm seeing that I'll have to get a pro Screencast account soon, and that's another $99 that either I or my division will have to come up with. Wouldn't it be great if Blackboard had a system to allow for video grading, or the college offered server space where students could access the videos?
Anyway, those are just a couple of recent experiences I've had with various tech experiments in class.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
A Glog of Links related to Educational Technology
Here is a link to an amazing Glog that details many of the most popular educational technology apps. I had to de-embed the glog itself from my blog since it had an auto-start for a song and it drove me crazy to have it start every time I visited my blog. A good lesson to learn: don't embed music with autostart on your glog!
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Pedagogy in the Read/Write Revolution
I was struck by the following paragraph in Will Richardson's recent blog post "The New Story (?)":
In these 10 years at least, the basic “story” of education hasn’t changed. Schools are where we go to get educated. With a very few well documented exceptions, it’s a planned, linear, for the most part standardized process, one that allows everyone to recognize what being “educated” means at the end of the day. We all learn basically the same stuff on the same day in the same way, take the same tests, get the same diploma. It’s that narrative most of us share, at least those of us who didn’t drop out or choose homeschooling as our option. It’s one that Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee and most everyone else who is trying to “reform” school still buys into. It is the best and easiest, most familiar story to tell, and it’s a deep part of our culture as Americans.
I'm finding more and more that it is that linearity that is frustrating me. Why should I be the one deciding what idea follows the next and how the narrative should be told? Yes, I'm the "teacher," which means I'm familiar with the material I'm teaching (ideally, anyway.) But I can't make the material meaningful to my students, only they can do that for themselves by making personal connections that I will likely not even be aware of. I can see LOTS of connection between the various ideas covered in a class, a whole three dimensional web of them, and there are any number of paths that can be taken, each step illuminating relationships that from any other perspective might be missed. Why shouldn't students work through the material as it best makes sense to each of them, sharing with the class the meaning(s) they find? I'd be there to answer questions, or ask them, but a half-step behind the students, rather than leading them where I think they should go.
I do have a few experiments going on this semester that I think relate to this idea. One is the use of the online bulletin board, to allow students to post questions and comments arranged spatially rather than in the sequence of a discussion board. I had students in one class try it last week and got almost entirely positive feedback. It wasn't a complete success, however, Students were willing to post their questions on virtual stickies and to place those stickies near other similar questions, but they didn't take the further step that I encouraged, to actually rearrange those stickies to identify patterns in the questions. Perhaps they weren't comfortable with taking ownership of others' posts and imposing their own order on them all? Or perhaps they are still thinking that their role is just to ask and MINE is to impose order? How do I overcome that?
Another experiment is that I am trying VERY hard not to be too present in the online class discussions. (And it is hard. I was the student who always had an opinion in class.) I don't want to stifle the conversation by swooping in as "the expert" to answer the question. I teach humanities, and one of the most important things that students need to learn is that there is no one right answer to the questions we raise. Instead, I'm allowing students to respond to each other, to try to give each other insight and ideas and come to some consensus (or to agree to disagree) on their own. Then, as the conversation winds down (a new one starts each week), I read over the posts, determine what dominant concerns were raised, and use my class blog to write a short essay to wrap up loose ends, address unresolved questions or add a point that I think needs to be addressed but wasn't. But I'm trying to take my cues from the students, rather than cue them to what they "should" learn from the week's readings.
I realize that this sort of unorganized structure won't work in some classes, maybe even most. (The math teachers' eyes are probably spinning in their heads. But perhaps that's why I never did well in math....) And I don't know how to combat the linearity of the system. Blackboard's entire structure is linear. Textbooks are linear. Degree programs are largely linear and so are many course sequences. And too many students still just want to know what they need to learn to pass the class, to move through and on to the next one, a straight line to graduation. I'm likely to frustrate them to no end. But perhaps, just perhaps, the rise of Web 2.0 will work in my favor in this. Students who are used to working with others to make their own way through World of Warcraft without a step-by-step guide, or who see commercially-produced music and videos as fodder for their own mash-ups already know that there is no one right way to do something, that meaning is found in the interaction with, not the passive consumption of information. Why shouldn't that be the organizing logic of our classes as well?
And on that note, I have to share a cool, new video series I've discovered, a trio of guys who are making interactive You Tube movies where you get to choose how the story plays out.
In these 10 years at least, the basic “story” of education hasn’t changed. Schools are where we go to get educated. With a very few well documented exceptions, it’s a planned, linear, for the most part standardized process, one that allows everyone to recognize what being “educated” means at the end of the day. We all learn basically the same stuff on the same day in the same way, take the same tests, get the same diploma. It’s that narrative most of us share, at least those of us who didn’t drop out or choose homeschooling as our option. It’s one that Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee and most everyone else who is trying to “reform” school still buys into. It is the best and easiest, most familiar story to tell, and it’s a deep part of our culture as Americans.
I'm finding more and more that it is that linearity that is frustrating me. Why should I be the one deciding what idea follows the next and how the narrative should be told? Yes, I'm the "teacher," which means I'm familiar with the material I'm teaching (ideally, anyway.) But I can't make the material meaningful to my students, only they can do that for themselves by making personal connections that I will likely not even be aware of. I can see LOTS of connection between the various ideas covered in a class, a whole three dimensional web of them, and there are any number of paths that can be taken, each step illuminating relationships that from any other perspective might be missed. Why shouldn't students work through the material as it best makes sense to each of them, sharing with the class the meaning(s) they find? I'd be there to answer questions, or ask them, but a half-step behind the students, rather than leading them where I think they should go.
I do have a few experiments going on this semester that I think relate to this idea. One is the use of the online bulletin board, to allow students to post questions and comments arranged spatially rather than in the sequence of a discussion board. I had students in one class try it last week and got almost entirely positive feedback. It wasn't a complete success, however, Students were willing to post their questions on virtual stickies and to place those stickies near other similar questions, but they didn't take the further step that I encouraged, to actually rearrange those stickies to identify patterns in the questions. Perhaps they weren't comfortable with taking ownership of others' posts and imposing their own order on them all? Or perhaps they are still thinking that their role is just to ask and MINE is to impose order? How do I overcome that?
Another experiment is that I am trying VERY hard not to be too present in the online class discussions. (And it is hard. I was the student who always had an opinion in class.) I don't want to stifle the conversation by swooping in as "the expert" to answer the question. I teach humanities, and one of the most important things that students need to learn is that there is no one right answer to the questions we raise. Instead, I'm allowing students to respond to each other, to try to give each other insight and ideas and come to some consensus (or to agree to disagree) on their own. Then, as the conversation winds down (a new one starts each week), I read over the posts, determine what dominant concerns were raised, and use my class blog to write a short essay to wrap up loose ends, address unresolved questions or add a point that I think needs to be addressed but wasn't. But I'm trying to take my cues from the students, rather than cue them to what they "should" learn from the week's readings.
I realize that this sort of unorganized structure won't work in some classes, maybe even most. (The math teachers' eyes are probably spinning in their heads. But perhaps that's why I never did well in math....) And I don't know how to combat the linearity of the system. Blackboard's entire structure is linear. Textbooks are linear. Degree programs are largely linear and so are many course sequences. And too many students still just want to know what they need to learn to pass the class, to move through and on to the next one, a straight line to graduation. I'm likely to frustrate them to no end. But perhaps, just perhaps, the rise of Web 2.0 will work in my favor in this. Students who are used to working with others to make their own way through World of Warcraft without a step-by-step guide, or who see commercially-produced music and videos as fodder for their own mash-ups already know that there is no one right way to do something, that meaning is found in the interaction with, not the passive consumption of information. Why shouldn't that be the organizing logic of our classes as well?
And on that note, I have to share a cool, new video series I've discovered, a trio of guys who are making interactive You Tube movies where you get to choose how the story plays out.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Changing the Paradigm
I think this video makes a good case for the need to take advantage of the opportunities of the read/write digital revolution. We can't be broadcasters, presenting one-side-fits-all information to a passive and captive audience. If we truly want a student-directed educational experience, we have to give students the tools to shape the course, not just their responses to that course.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Lino
I'm currently on a quest to find an online bulletin board program, something that will allow students to add comments, pictures, videos, files, link, etc. on to a collaborative space where they can work together to visualize ideas. I've been playing with www.stixy.com, but now I think I've found a better one, www.linoit.com. I've created a public board to play with this program, and it would be great if you'd also check it out and give me some feedback. I don't believe you need to have an account or log in to add stickies. I'm wondering if guests can rearrange the stickies as well. So please check it out and let me know what you think. The program gives three options for sharing: the URL of a site http://linoit.com/users/ychumanities/canvases/Sukey%27s%20test%20lino
Or a link, which is an active image to click on.
Or a link, which is an active image to click on.
Or you can embed the actual board in another site like this one. However, I had to change the height and width in the HTML code to make the frame fit into this blog, and as you can see, it only shows you a section of the entire board. You actually have to grab and drag the image to slide it around to see the whole thing, at least at this size. Not so useful, unless there is a way to have it open in a new window or something, in which case you might as well use the link.
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