Archive for July, 2008

Learning In A Flat World » The Twitter Sphere - Two Uses

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on July 31, 2008
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A couple of tweets caught my eye today (and had Jeff Nugent and I in deep conversation!).

followed by:

In the first, Steve Rubel pointed all of us to a blog post by Leah Jones entitled Enabled Serendipity. Leah talked about how Twitter continually enables her to find and meet other people who are passing through life in the same places she is at. If she is in an airport or passing time at a restaurant, she will tweet that fact and find other people doing the same thing, and hook up with them. I was not sure whether she was tweeting with a laptop or a cellphone (and it probably does not matter), but the fact remained that she had taken a communication application and turned it from a virtual connection tool into a physical connection tool.

She noted:

“Due to the Enabled Serendipity of Twitter, I now have a global community. I’ve met people around the country and abroad. I’ve fallen in and out of something close to love. I’ve been able to make introductions that turned into jobs. I have a new group of friends in Chicago that don’t roll their eyes when I talk about nerdy-nerdy things and I’ve even got most of my family on Twitter…”

Not sure I have the cajones to serendipitously meet people this way, but I find it fascinating that she is so comfortable doing it. As we become more “wired” and wireless, will this become more common and an accepted practice?

The second tweet came from one of the participants in our summer Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute, Audrey Short. At the Institute, Audrey teamed up with another participant, Cindy Kissel-Ito, so that both would begin using Twitter and also have their summer students use Twitter. Audrey was teaching an ESL course, while Cindy was teaching a World Studies course. The combination gave non-English speakers access to partners to practice English, while the World Studies students gained access to individuals from other cultures. Audrey’s tweet pointed us to her Tumblr site where she reflected on the course and her students comments on their experiences. It was obvious that the pairing of the classes had a positive impact. One student said:

“The most enjoyable activity in this speaking class for me is to talk with the world study students because I am shy person and this activity helps me to remove my shyness and this activity help me try to find some word to make the person understands me, so this activity improve my vocabulary.”

As Jeff noted to me, we are beginning so see this “free” tool used in some interesting and unique ways, with little regard as to its long-term viability (which has been rocky to date). It appears to be already becoming part of the landscape even though no one knows whether it will be here in six months - or look the same, and we are certainly not seeing many people asking:

“Who owns all of this social data?”

“How is this data being used?”

I don’t know…and if you do, send me the answer (in 140-characters or less). But…as more and more systems try and regulate (or ban) social media (for instance), I find it refreshing that we have two positive examples of uses of Twitter. The whale wins in these cases!

{Photo Credit: Lemasney}


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Techfoot » Course Planning For Emerging Technology

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A colleague of mine recently likened the course planning process to what goes on inside a sausage factory:

Over a century ago, the German statesman Otto Von Bismarck supposedly said, “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” Same point can be made about the way I construct course syllabi…

While some folks may be shocked by realities of how faculty members plan their courses, I think there is real value to opening up the process. In that spirit, I’m planning to use this blog to reflect on my activities in preparing the Emerging Technologies in Education course that I’m planning for the fall. The planning model that I use looks something like this.

For me, course planning involves balancing three sets of interlocking goals: the learning goals of the individual students, the constraints (and affordances) of accomplishing those goals in a credit-bearing college course, and the “institutional press” of conducting the class within a specific institutional culture. When I plan a class, I try to structure our time together in a way that does justice to the complexity of these three sets of expectations. In a perfect world, the goals would be largely aligned, but in the real world of practice they seldom are.

As a course planner, I make decisions about structure, sequence, timing, grading and the myriad of other details based on my individual interpretation of the context of the class. There are at least four lenses that I use to focus on the particulars of a class.

  • Educational Philosophy: Since the earliest scientific studies on curriculum, planners have noted that course design is a reflection of individual educational philosophy, and there is tremendous variation in the fundamental world views that shape teachers decisions. While my practice draws on a variety of perspectives–liberal education, progressivism, sometimes even behaviorism–my primary decision-making lenses are humanistic education and individualized instruction.
  • Authentic Learning: As an intellectual and genetic descendent of John Dewey, I’m committed to building classes that advance authentic learning: learning that uses real-world problems and projects and that allow students to explore and discuss these problems in ways that are relevant to them.
  • Authentic Teaching: One of the dangers of a scientific approach to teaching and learning is that it devalues the relationship between teacher and learner. In planning courses, I try to find topics, techniques and problems that connect to my genuine interests and concerns. In Parker Palmer’s terms: “Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will also find the joy that every human being seeks–we will also find our authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Fredrick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’”
  • Communities of Practice:. I’ve come agree with John Seeley Brown that one of the major goals of education is to bring students into contact with divergent communities with distinct understanding of knowledge and distinct ways of judging what is interesting, valid and significant. The focus of a community of practice is “learning to be” rather than merely mastering a body of knowledge. A major question in my courses is what does it mean to be an effective learner, citizen, teacher or administrator in a time of unparalleled technological change.

Translating those broad principles into practice—a set of activities and interactions, bounded by time and constrained by the realities of “institutional press”—make the course planning process an enormously complex one, but one that constitutes the heart of effective teaching.

Geeky Mom » Random Thoughts About Learning And Literacy

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I didn't write about the NY Times article on how the Internet is causing reading to decline, but a few others did. I've been thinking about it and discussing it with others. My thoughts aren't fully formed. This morning, I was reading this post and then this one, and they're not really related, but they are, sort of. What I keep thinking is that we (I don't really know who this "we" is) keep privileging a certain kind of literacy, a certain kind of learning. We no longer seem to value the person who's good at fixing cars or can make pottery. In part, this might be driven by a decline in the kind of skilled-labor jobs that didn't require a degree. What options are there for the non-readers, the people who just don't get jived by books? And why are we so upset that they don't? Are we afraid that an educated public might be educated through reading online and watching YouTube and tv and listening to music on their iPhones and that our own book-based learning won't be privileged anymore?

I get the feeling that we're trying to pidgeonhole, to say that learning is this or that, that literacy is this or that, instead of looking at what's out there for people to engage with and figure out how to leverage that for learning.

Learning In A Flat World » What Do Administrators Need To Know About Web 2.0?

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This fall, I will once again be teaching an online course for our School of Education on Instructional Strategies Using the Internet. The course I was given and taught last year was primarily a teaching-centered course that had little to do with the target audience, Masters students in Education Leadership. So, with the help and blessing of Jon Becker, we are redesigning the course this year to address Instructional Uses of the Internet from an administrator’s perspective…making it a much more relevant course.

The game plan Jon suggested is to introduce these graduate students (all K-12 teachers) to Web 2.0 first, and then explore tech planning, funding, legal issues, and faculty development. I am excited about this new direction for the course and look forward to its startup in a month.

Part of the course plan is to let the students research and share findings on Web 2.0 tools. However, having met last week with these students, Jon and I found that they are not very web literate, so I am nervous about just turning them loose. One thought would be to start with Jane Hart’s list, have each student develop a tutorial on a different tool and then share that with the class. But would that in and of itself help future administrators appreciate the possibilities and challenges associated with Web 2.0? I thought I would toss the idea out here in the edublogosphere and see what other thoughts you might have on ways to tackle this topic?

Got some ideas?

{Photo Credit: Steve Rhodes}


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Geeky Mom » Welcome To My World

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I found this article by Paula Krebs to be quite revealing about faculty vis a vis collaboration. Everything I do is like the Institute Ms. Krebs ran. In fact, I direct or co-direct an Institute every summer. Many staff do these kinds of things here because most faculty won't.

Any project I do has to go through committees and involves at a minimum of 4 people, all of whom have wildly diverging views at times. I almost never have the benefit of getting to work on a personal project or a project where I "get my way" so to speak. I rely all the time on the good will and expertise of the staff around me. Unlike Krebs, I don't have a personal assistant to manage all of my details, but I do parcel out work where I need to--to our department secretary, to our purchasing agent, to our system administrators. I couldn't do anything without them.

Ms. Krebs ends with this paragraph:
I still value my autonomy in the classroom and elsewhere. But I think I have a much better grip on how truly collaborative the educational enterprise is. And that's bound to be good for me, as a faculty member, to remember.
I wish other faculty would learn the same lessons. I'm not sure those that have similar experiences come out of those experiences with the same realizations that Krebs had. Many faculty I know still operate in a kind of "independent contractor" mode. If we had a "we're all in this together" mentality, we might get somewhere.

This dovetails into Dean Dad's commentary today on service. Part of why, it seems, that faculty don't want to or don't know how to collaborate is because it's so obviously not valued. What's valued are individual contributions, either to teaching or research. And the us vs. them mentality that occurs between faculty and staff (esp. administrators) means there are a precious few opportunities for staff and faculty to work together. What that means is that while faculty contribute to decisions about curriculum or tenure and promotion guidelines, they don't often contribute to decisions that effect them daily--how to make certain kinds of purchases, what software or cms to use. They are often asked, but they don't want to do the hard work of attending meetings and making evaluations. I'm not saying this is their fault, by any means. If I were in their shoes, looking at what gets me tenured or promoted, I wouldn't attend a meeting to discuss possible email systems either. But then, I'm not sure it's fair to complain about those decisions either. When faculty ask me about such things, I tell them how to contribute or when they had (past tense) many opportunities to have a say. They shrug. They would be heard if they had their say, which is more than I can say for some staff members.

Learning In A Flat World » Rest In Peace, Randy

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Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, died today. He was diagnosed just two years ago with pancreatic cancer and told he had months to live. I never met Randy, but I along with millions heard his “Last Lecture” that he gave to his faculty and students…and kids. It was a message of life, not death. He was featured on Oprah, listed as a Person of the Week on NBC, and inspired a huge following on YouTube.

I am one of the lucky ones. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2002, treated by some wonderful doctors, and appear to be cancer-free six years later. But I know some of the emotions Randy felt in thinking through his message to his kids. I have been lucky to see both of my daughters marry and to hold both grandkids. I hope my last lecture is still far off in the future, but I have been inspired by Randy to enjoy life fully, because each day is precious and a treasure.

If you have not heard Randy’s Last Lecture, I am embedding it below. It is worth the 16 minutes.

Randy will be remembered in many ways. I found myself wondering this morning what his last lecture looked like in Wordle. The result is here:

Rest in peace, Randy.


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Geeky Mom » Web 2.0 And The Future Of . . .

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I was going to say education, but I think it's bigger than that. I spent some time this morning reading around a collection of linked blog posts and articles related to connectedness, web 2.0, education, democracy, etc. Jen argues that the future of education is not Web 2.0, and I think I agree. It's not Web 2.0 because there will be Web 3.0 or 4.0 or something completely different or a complete collapse of the Internet as we know it. It's also not because it's being gentrified as Jim Groom says, moving not into the read/write web, but into the gated communities of CMS's. The promise of Web 2.0 is only for the John Waynes or the Ingalls among us, willing to try and fail and suffer through the server outages, the disappearance of tools and entire web sites, and taking a shower only on Saturdays.

But I do think there's some lessons that we can all learn from Web 2.0. People want to connect and participate and they learn from those connections and that participation. Are we teaching our students to learn from each other, to build a learning network for themselves that's made up of people and resources (a la George Siemens' connectivism)? Nothing that I've accomplished in the last 3-5 years has been accomplished on my own. My dissertation, perhaps one of the most individual of endeavors, was read by blog friends and face-to-face friends and advisers. People commented on the ideas I threw out on the blog. I emailed people and asked for help, for resources, to play a sounding board. I used this blog to keep me motivated and honest. Even in work, I rely on colleagues, both local and remote to help me figure out WordPress, find new tools, articles to read, and ideas to think about.

The rhetoric of academic integrity and honor codes and scholarship tends to make it seem like getting help and collaborating are bad things. They are to be avoided at all costs. I know plenty of people who try to get students to do "group work"--writing a paper, doing a project, etc.--and are disappointed. Sometimes they throw up a wiki and figure that the technology will just make that happen. We don't model collaboration for them at all. Professors talk about papers they write, books they write, or conferences they attend. They don't talk about the people that read their drafts or the students who worked in their labs and ran the experiments. They don't talk about the colleagues they see at conferences with whom they have valuable conversations that help them frame their thinking about their research or teaching. And they speak disparagingly, if at all, about the committee work they do, rather than seeing that as collaborative work, which is hard (because yes, you have to keep Mr. Grumpy in check and watch Mr. Know-it-all grandstand) but valuable.

I don't think you necessarily need fancy Web 2.0 tool of the week to help students learn how to learn from each other and from their network. It can make it easier for them. More importantly, I think, is to create assignments that push them to work with others, to have class discussions that draw out lots of different points of view, to have them write in ways that push them to include those points of view, to rely on something besides their own inner thoughts, to find ways to take what's happening in the world and connect it to their academic work. Why are statistics important? How will reading this book make me a better citizen? In what ways does the media distort science? Technology certainly helps find the answers to these questions. Newspapers are readily available online as are the journal articles from which their articles are drawn. Wikipedia offers its discussion tab so that students can see that any article has behind a lot of ideas and positions that may or may not have been included, showing that knowledge itself is in constant flux. Discussion forums and blogs offer opportunities to continue classroom discussions or include book authors or alums in discussions about reading material. But we can't just expect our students to use the technology in that way. Facebook and MySpace don't encourage the kind of deep discussions that can be possible. We need think carefully about the tools we use or don't use and help students navigate the online landscape appropriately.

As for the distractedness of Facebook and Twitter, and their ilk. Yes, they're distracting. Yes, we and our students are pulled in many different directions. And yes, some of the stuff that's out there encourages a kind of shallowness that many disdain. But that shallowness forms some of the fabric of our lives. I can connect with people when we share interests--tv shows, celebrities, movies, games, an Internet meme. Much of the time, we can take it to the next level. And I don't think distractedness always comes from the technology. As workers, I think we are often asked to take on more and more. We become inundated with tasks and have a hard time focusing on one task at a time. It doesn't help when every task seems as urgent as the last. Maybe those tasks come through email and im instead of on the paper memos of the past, which means they come faster, but I don't think it's about the technology, per se. Instead of critiquing the technology, maybe we should look at the economic structures that impose more work on fewer workers and give more money to the people at the top. Maybe we're distracted because we don't even *have* free time anymore.

Learning In A Flat World » Still Mentally On Vacation

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Where has the week gone? I posted a blog post on Sunday and now it is Thursday afternoon, and I have not felt compelled to blog since. Part of the reason is that I have been pretty busy at work laying out the schedule for our Center’s fall workshops (nearly a hundred to schedule). But the other side of it is that - while I have continued interacting with others through Twitter and blogs, I have not had any theme rise to the surface that compelled me to write.

So I must still mentally be back in New England, where I could stroll along the beach with my grandson or watch his eyes light up when we watched hot air balloons flying by at the Warwick Hot Air Balloon Festival.

Here are a few pictures I took:

Beautiful sunset takeoff:

Sooooooooooooooooo…

Time to get out of vacation mode and back in to reflecting on teaching and learning with technology.

….Maybe next week!


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Geeky Mom » Colleges Left Behind?

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My students and I reading some articles and blog posts focused on the issue of technology integration into courses. We're also interviewing several faculty to find out what they use, why they do or don't take advantage of technological resources, etc. It's been interesting so far. Today's reading includes this blog post by James Farmer on distributed learning. His argument is that the publishers are investing lots of money in creating online resources and, instead of marketing and providing them to the faculty and their institutions, they're marketing them to the students. The problem with this is that many students can't afford to buy these materials and that there's little evaluation of the effectiveness of these materials. Good or bad is determined by market forces, not by considering whether students are learning. What struck me most about the post, however, is the following comment by Farmer on the lack of investment most colleges have made toward developing online course materials.

Creating effective course materials is expensive. So far few colleges and universities have been able or willing to allocate those resources.

It is unreasonable to ask faculty to create such materials because (1) they likely do not have extensive background in pedagogy and instructional design and multimedia authoring technologies, (2) they likely do not have the production experience to produce professional level learning materials, and (3) production takes a lot of time and effort.

For the next decade or so we can expect the costs of production to increase even those the cost of the technology may decrease. Student expectations, as with motion pictures, are constantly increasing. Game-like student/learning system interaction is both very effective and very expensive.

Forthcoming research will show how few resources are available to faculty. Preliminary estimates show a educational technologist supports more than 100 faculty, or less than 12 hours per academic year per professor.


I think Farmer is right on. Faculty aren't going to do this and in many cases, they shouldn't. On the other hand, the people who should be doing this work--technologists--are not plentiful enough to develop enough materials to compete with the investments made by the publishers. From my position in a small liberal arts college not interested in distance learning or much of online anything, what the publishers are producing doesn't necessarily meet our needs. They meet the needs of large state schools, community colleges and/or distance ed programs at various places. While many faculty at schools like mine might say, we don't need those materials because of the kind of institution we are, I think we can't simply dismiss the idea out of hand. What I think is needed is a close analysis of what's out there and to think about what might be appropriate for our institution. We may not need online tutorials on grammar, but maybe a peer-reviewed online undergraduate journal would be interesting. Many faculty here are creating these materials anyway, in an ad hoc way, stretching themselves way too thin in the process--and sometimes losing their jobs as a result. Most faculty, I think, really do recognize the value that some software and online resources provide, but no one is thinking about how to make those materials for themselves or how to fund that effort or how to organize and evaluate it. Which is too bad, because we might find ourselves struggling to keep up or being left behind entirely.

Remediation Roomy-nation Blogs » “twirony”

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Twirony
(noun) The joy of finally having internet service at home again after a week and wanting to express your joy on Twitter, but encountering
Fail Whale