Instructional / Emerging Technology Notes

moving day

2009-04-17T12:01:00.002-04:00

I moved this blog, posts and all, to here: http://techteachlearn.wordpress.com/

I still like Blogger and still maintain my Second Life blog here, but am starting a team venture and wanted a fresh start in a new and different space.

just for fun

2009-04-14T14:07:00.004-04:00

Maybe you've already seen this Twitter-phobic video, but does it express what you've been thinking?

That's a pretty brief video; compare to this long article on whether Twitter is good or bad for us. It contains the video and a few other cartoons, but you will have to show if you can really focus your attention to read the whole thing.

crowdsourcing, smart mobs, ideagoras: more collaboration or something else?

2009-04-08T08:39:00.004-04:00

First a few terms.

crowdsourcing: from Wikipedia, "a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call." Other terms for this act: "community-based design" and "distributed participatory design." Some also call it spec work because members of the community can bid on doing the job or hope to be chosen for the job, instead of going through normal hiring methods. crowdSPRING is an online company that facilitates crowdsourcing for its members.

smart mobs: From Wikipedia, "A smart mob is a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated, intelligent emergent behavior. The concept was introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution." Such mobs can physically gather just to create a scene, or they might have some social/political motivation, as in Meetups (remember how popular those were a few elections ago?). Are these virtual entities examples of the smart mob/crowdsourcing phenomenon: eBay (business built and powered by users), Second Life (a virtual world built by users), and Wikipedia, itself (an encyclopedia built and maintained by users)?

ideagoras: Depending on the context, a place/space/network/marketplace for ideas. Drawing on the popular concept of crowdsourcing, the focus is on innovation. Take the Innovate-Ideagora, related to the journal Innovate, it describes itself as "an open agora, where problems seek solutions, new visions are explored, and the status quo is challenged." Or there's this take on ideagoras in business that sounds a lot like any crowdsourcing article, but the concept in business often leans toward consulting services. I suppose the old think-tank is an instance of an ideagora.

__________________
What's in it for education?

Here's an interesting section of the blog Education Innovation on Crowdsourcing. It's more than one post, so scroll down through all. The first post looks forward to a crowdsourced type of wikipedia of video content that is that is educational and research driven. More likely to happen in the near future are the crowdsourced textbooks envisioned in the second post, and I expect that they would also take advantage of the participatory wiki format. Can you imagine a wikipedia-like site with tones of content on one subject? Let's say you need course material (no longer called a textbook) for a course in Nursing and there's a comprehensive and searchable wiki on the topic that allows you to pick and choose where to send students for readings and resources, like videos and images with Creative Commons licenses, links to professional organizations and journal articles. And you might even ask your students to work on editing a page or topic in the wiki as a way to both contribute to the profession and learn more through research.

You could have students experiment with crowdsourcing an idea on Twitter or some other microblogging service and reporting the results. Or introduce a group project using the concept of crowdsourcing to give students a fresh approach to the old group project that so many students dread. Have them create a wiki for the project or use Twitter to discuss it or let them decide what tool to use.

Lastly, as a professional concept, how do you feel about crowdsourcing a solution to a problem in teaching? Have you built a professional learning network (PLN) on Twitter that could respond to your questions? Does your institution or department have a wiki or blog that can serve as an ideagora? Maybe if college committees were called Smart Mobs and allowed to behave like them, they would be more productive and would be more interested in meeting.

I knew there was one good example of using Twitter as a crowdsourcing tool for a library project: http://b2e.nitle.org/index.php/2008/12/05/crowdsourcing_ideas_about_libraries_in_2

The Seven Deadly Sins Of Technology In Higher

2009-04-03T08:51:00.001-04:00

Are you guilty of any of these positions?

The Seven Deadly Sins Of Technology In Higher

View more presentations from Sarah Robbins.

Friday Fun w/ Augmented Reality

2009-03-06T09:45:00.007-05:00

Tried out the cool feature at http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality, which you can do if you have a webcam on your computer. Here's an example of how it will work from YouTube:

I did it and it was fantastic. You can see my video on Screencast:
GrinnPidgeon

clicker report

2009-03-05T15:07:00.002-05:00

Remember all the practicing with online polling options and thinking about clickers? Well, here is the report I worked up on the current state of classroom response systems:

Class Response Systems

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Reports Academic Work audience response sy classroom response s

love the cloud, fear the cloud

2009-02-17T08:38:00.011-05:00

I had two interesting experiences with clouds yesterday--as in those spaces on the Internet where you can access software as a service (SaaS) and store files, for example.

I sync my Outlook calendar (Entourage, really, on my Mac) with my Mac iCalendar and then with my Google calendar, so that I can always see what I should be doing when I don't have access to the school network. In addition, it allows me to embed my Google calendar on my personal web page, so others can see where I am. All my information and the syncing process works through my account on Mobile Me, an Apple service that provides email, calendar, and storage.

Well, something went wrong yesterday, meaning I did something wrong. Wasn't paying attention. Said yes when I should have said no. In an instant, all my calendars were empty, and I realized how much I depend on them to guide my work and schedule. I had some frightful moments, until I realized I had published my iCal as a web page for sharing and that it still existed, but I didn't know for how long. So I subscribed to it and then went about fixing everything in a backwards fashion. So, yesterday, was clearly an example of the love/hate relationship with one cloud in my sky.

Later, there was a flurry of discontent on every social network about Facebook's new terms of service which spelled out what seemed to be a right to everyone's posted material, such as photos and videos, forever. Here's how Mark Zuckerberg explained the situation, and let's see if he objects to my using the photo he uses on Facebook:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear. Read the rest . . . .

As I noted on Twitter yesterday before this was posted, to quote myself, "I sorta figure when I post any content that I am tacitly agreeing to share it with anyone who can right-click--what's the FB difference?" So, it didn't come as a surprise to me that Facebook made clear that it was one of anyone. Some people were talking about how to delete your entire Facebook account, but in social networking, aren't we making the first step of trusting the network itself? Sure, there are ways to work safely, to be selective in the information you share, but if you fear the software/application/site/etc. you are paralyzed. I'm not worried about my content on Facebook, but I can tell you that I do not share everything. I am not playing the 8, 16, 20 or whatever number things-you-don't-know-about-me game that's going around. Let's leave some things unknown and still socialize for our own reasons.

P.S I could have posted any number of page images from Facebook to illustrate my post, but decided on the Tri-C libraries fan page, in case you didn't know about it and wanted to be a fan.

Update 2/18/09: Facebook reconsiders its TOS, reverting to the old TOS in the meantime:

why Twitter?

2009-02-09T13:17:00.011-05:00

It's been a year since I first posted about Twitter. I was harsh, unkind, suggesting that we were twits, me included. Yet, I gave it a long chance to become part of my daily technology-reading routine, alongside reading RSS blog feeds, online news, email, calendar agenda.

During that time, I thought a lot about whether it could usefully be an educational tool, and I think that it has developed into one, not limited to a prescribed use, but open to your imagination.

Twitter is a tool for microblogging. Micro, because you are limited to 140 characters. Go over and get a warning, meet the 140 exactly and you've created a twoosh. Blogging, because you are publishing, and if I must remind you again, a blog is not a discussion board. You publish for your own reasons and replies are gravy. On Twitter, you may get a reply, a re-tweet when someone wants to let more people know what you said, a direct message that is not public, or you may get nothing at all. On occasion, your tweet will create a ruckus and it will spread like a virus, but virality is not something you can control.

I use it personally and professionally by carefully picking people to follow whom I know personally and/or professionally or would like to know. I follow around a hundred and that's plenty for me, because I like to keep up with what they are saying, and that's not as hard as it sounds because there are a host of applications and plugins that make it easy to stay connected. I often have both Tweetdeck and Twhirl open, or might go to the Twitter web page, using the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, because it shows pix and videos inline. Another Firefox plugin, Twitterfox, pops up with new Tweets from the browser status bar. You can have Twitter update your Facebook status through a Facebook app, and you can install a Twitter gadget alongside your Gmail.

Professionally, I benefit from hearing about new technology, following links to neat blogs and articles and videos about technology, as well as hearing appeals for answers to complicated technology problems, or news about successes. And along the way, these professional voices become a community I belong to, not one that is all work and no play.

What can you use it for in your classes? Well, I hear that it can work as a classroom response system if all your students are equipped with computers or web-enabled mobiles. You would "collect" the responses on the Twitter web page if you wanted to display it.

Although I'm not a fan of using Twitter to create threads, hash-mark tagging (#your keyword) allows you to see all the comments with the same tag. So, you can create a tag for your group or class and then see them all on the Twitter search page. You might allow students to create what's referred to as a backchannel in the class, an ongoing Twitter discussion of participants (students)--such use of Twitter is now common at conferences and large meetings, or at national events like the recent election or last night's Grammy Awards.

I've gone way over my 140 character limit. Give it a try, a good long try, and let me know what you think.

more wiki ideas

2009-01-21T13:13:00.000-05:00

I am finishing reading and annotating the new Horizon Report, and was just distracted by something useful from Howard Rheingold--this link to the syllabus for Digital Democracy, a course at Tufts, taught by Joshua Goldstein and Patrick Meier.

Please note the nice feature that it resides on a wiki, where it can be edited to update information, and can be a space for the course participants to work, if permitted.

2009 Horizon Report

2009-01-20T18:25:00.007-05:00

Download the 2009 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and let's talk about it tomorrow.

[Sorry, got sidetracked by office visitors and I'm a day late with my response to the new Horizon Report.] Here are the six topics covered this year:

mobiles
cloud computing
geo-everything
personal web
semantic-aware applications
smart objects

I have some comments about three of them, but feel free to add your own comments about those or any on the list.

Mobiles carries over last year's topic of Mobile Broadband, and I won't be surprised to see it again until we all have mobile devices that have access to broadband and data plans. I think there are still too many people wearing blinders about our students' access to both broadband and devices that can access the web. Many students are lucky to have laptops with which they can access our wireless on campus. So, I always take with a grain of salt ways of using cell phones in the classroom that require Web and email connectivity. So many recommended classroom uses are based on the iPhone, possibly the most expensive of the smart phones, without consideration of students' actual devices, that I am wary of the success of such projects. I do agree, however, that we are moving closer to a time when the mobile device is commonplace and ubiquitous.
Geo-Everything: Again, the ability to use geo-location/GPS to tag locations, depends on mobile devices to a great extent, if you are in the field. And the report's examples do illustrate that field work, particularly in the sciences, makes good use of geo-tagging. I'm grateful that they also include a use in literary studies of mapping out geographical locations in literary works. They use the example of The Travels of Marco Polo, and provide a link to an idea using Google Earth to explore literature. Much like recreating a virtual literary space in Second Life, this kind of visualization is engaging as it inspires students to think creatively in imagining more fully the author's depictions.
Personal Web. This is particularly interesting to me, as I am thoroughly invested in having access to information at my fingertips and publishing my ideas, whether it be here on this blog, in Twitter or Facebook, on my personal Website, or my ePortfolio. The customization of personal Web space through widgets, for example, is a step in creating your own Personal Learning Network (PLN), part of the ability to educate yourself. Combined with tools like Zotero and Delicious that let you aggregate resources in links or bibliographic entries, and that let you have access to the collected resources of others, today's students participate in their own development in ways we couldn't have imagined ten years ago. Read a previous post about do-it-yourself sites, like PageFlakes for an example.

What I like about the Horizon Report is that is prods us to look to the future, says it's okay to wonder about how technology might advance and how educators might use it. I think it can often have us thinking about what's available now, as well, which is good, because now is where we are.

writing, revising, and a record of it

2009-01-16T07:56:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Gardner Campbell for recommending this short, but fascinating, video about one Wikipedia page transformation over time: Jon Udell: Heavy metal umlaut. The evolution from single sentence to accepted full page is a good example of how what Udell calls "a loose federation of worldwide volunteers" can commit to creating an honest and valid record of cultural history.

Why would this be interesting to you? Well, it would be a great example to students of the value of editing to produce good quality writing (and Campbell echoes this idea). What if your students were assigned, alone or in groups, to work in a wiki to create a report or write a paper that showed all their revising history? It would be a terrific record for students who generally write over existing text when revising in a word-processing program and lose those previous passages. In one sense, the wiki space allows us to return to that world of manuscripts and handwritten notes that have thrilled students of textual studies for decades. More importantly, it would give today's digital students a deeper connection to their writing processes and make them better writers and thinkers.

I'd love to hear about your experiments with wikis in your courses.

FINALLY! a good presentation tool

2009-01-13T14:36:00.005-05:00

I'm not sure I should post when I'm speechless. What's the emoticon for wide-eyed wonder?

I just made my first Prezi, a sort of one-slide presentation where you have the whole presentation laid out as if on the dining room table, and you zoom in and out to your presentation topics. You can set up a path to follow using arrows, which I think is a good idea, even though you can diverge from that path at any time and return to it. The design possibilties are staggering and the interest of such a presentation will trump any PowerPoint. Go here and view the demos at the bottom of the page to be, pardon my 60s lingo, blown away! Here's an image of my first Prezi, which, although it lacks enough media interest, inspired me to think in different terms about importance of idea, sequence, visual opportunities.

Update: I fixed the actual Prezi to have a path that allows you to use the arrows to click through the presentation, although you can use the spacebar at any time to back out or you can click on any item to view it. I also noticed that I had put in a questionable photo--ooops, where did I get that?--so I put in another.

I've been reading slide:ology and trying to keep good design ideas in mind for presentations, and I think they would work as well on this one-slide model--maybe better.

I'm psyched! because I was afraid the death of presentations was at hand (and perhaps should have been). Now there's hope for engaging your audience and changing the way you think about your presentation as you create it.

EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges of 2009

2009-01-09T21:21:00.000-05:00

Read the EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges of 2009.

technology for whom?

2009-01-09T14:03:00.004-05:00

It's encouraging to hear that the new administration is calling for "an investment in technology" in education, but what are you thinking when you hear that and how do you put it into action? Too often, as faculty, we don't go far enough in exploring and utilizing new technologies. Too often we learn new technologies to employ in the classroom--f2f or online--but we don't look into technologies that our students can work in and learn from, whether they are discipline-specific technologies they will use in their professions or technologies that will sharpen their skills and general comfort level with technology.

That's why you always hear instructional technologists pushing technologies that require collaboration and interaction among students, and why we encourage the use of what we all may think are everyday technologies. Even if you can't find a technology that pertains to your field of study, you can use ones that will make students into good digital citizens. What are some of the skills all our students need to sharpen?

Email etiquette and development. Students need to know good practices for communicating by email, since that is the standard for professional communication today. Did you know that the youngest of our students think of email as a tool for old people? That usually translates into poor writing habits, particularly when students start using SMS shorthand in emails--not appropriate. Such components as subject lines, greetings, closings, and signatures can be addressed in your syllabus--if it sounds like an exercise in letter writing, it is.
Uploading and downloading documents and all that goes with it. Our students need a good understanding of how to handle document exchange. They are wrong if they think it's only a process needed at school. You can offer a variety of opportunities to work with documents, particularly if you use Blackboard. Use the Assignments feature and the Digital Dropbox to require uploading; use email to require attachments. Educate your students on how to avoid problems when others view their files, from file formats to good filenaming conventions.
Make sure that your students have had instruction on how to search effectively and how to evaluate information for validity. Here's a short video explaining that:

The next time you are adopting a technology, think about whether it helps you or your students. That's fine if it's a tool to improve your teaching, but do you also have enough uses of technology to help improve your studetns' skills?

voicethread--create a conversation

2009-01-07T08:30:00.003-05:00

After an interesting Second Life session yesterday, I heard about VoiceThread, a free technology that lets you create a conversation around a photo or video or text document. You could create a public conversation or have students use it to create a presentation. Feel free to comment on mine, and notice that even though the tool is called voicethread, you can choose to write a text comment:

internet searching and brain function

2009-01-03T08:23:00.002-05:00

This study is making the rounds as evidence that there are new ways of thinking for those experienced on the web:

UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function.

I'm not hoping that anytime soon the inexperienced will stop pooh-poohing the web as evidence of a lost attention span, but it's a start. Change is hard to accept because it's hard to see as it happens, but I think we are developing new ways of thinking/reading/analyzing information.

Of course, the study was for middle-aged+ users, and the intended results seem to be more about how to keep our minds active and healthy as we age, but the evidence of brain stimulation and improved brain function (or the possibility for it) will surely be studied on a broader range of ages. Interesting stuff for educators.

You can download UCLA's image of the brains here.

form follows function?

2008-12-16T10:11:00.002-05:00

I missed last Friday's post because of all-day training with WIDS software, so I guess I should talk about such software and its application in course and program development.

WIDS (Worldwide Instructional Design System) allows you to generate documents from information you input into a variety of database forms, such as syllabus--in GREAT detail. I am a novice, having had the introductory training (only the first of two sessions) and just beginning to fill in forms for myself. First, I'm seeing how one of my own syllabi fits into the template; then I will probably see how it might work for both a program of faculty development and individual workshop planning.

But even as a novice, I do have some impressions of WIDS.

For faculty it's a little overwhelming at first. After having taught and created syllabi at several institutions, it seems like overkill for faculty. I'm guessing that the up front investment of time is high, but that it becomes easier and more useful the more you use it. For the organized of you out there, it will beome the place for all course information modules.
In the long run, it could help ensure that all your syllabi and course information is consistent from course to course. Could you be consistent using your own documents as models rather than filling up a database, yes.
The real value seems to be for program directors who need to organize standards and collect course data for accreditation. The ability to create documents about course and program requirements for new faculty would be an added bonus.
I have not seen how the software aids in course design, only in document creation. I have not found any forms that discuss course design, so I'm not sure how it lives up to that claim.
If I can be forgiven one negative impression, having only gone through half the training, it is that the whole idea of filling in forms and conforming to a rigid glossary of terms is stifling. I would prefer that we promote and learn the core elements of good courses and learning methods and creatively design from those. Teaching is the kind of craft that works differently for different personalities--both teachers and learners--and there needs to be some flexibility to stretch for it all to work. I'm willing to be persuaded that WIDS can work that way, and will come back with an update, when I find out how.

evolution of clickers to no clickers?

2008-12-05T09:28:00.005-05:00

I'm collecting information on how faculty can employ classroom response (clicker) technology on the cheap. Before we buy into a product, particularly one that students have to purchase that are of no use outside the classroom, I think we need to explore using cell phone text messaging or SMS.

Even a top company like Turning Technologies has been moving fast in the direction away from the independent clicker. First they created the anytime, anywhere Response Card Anywhere that you could use on a field trip, and now they have software for your phone--Responseware.

That's cool, but why payware in a world of freeware?

Then there's the Open Source Poll Everywhere software that is free for classes of 30 or less. That's a pretty tight limitation that would only work for a select few classes. I will be trying it out and reporting in a formal document to distribute to faculty.

Here's a sample poll from Poll Everywhere. The Keyword is the phrase that begins with "cast":

Make your own poll voting question with Poll Everywhere

I'm sure that if there's not one already, that the Apple iTunes App Store will have one soon for free, but then there's the cost of an iPod Touch or iPhone to deal with, and that's an even bigger cost.

I'm probably going to suggest a wait and see how it all turns out before we commit to a campus-wide contract.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In response to the comment, below, I tried a Google form poll (although not with any respondents, yet). They are really easy to make, and you'll notice in my second question that you could choose other, and that would become part of the class discussion. Alternatively, I could have let the audience type in their "other" response.

<p>Loading...</p>

As noted in Chris' blog description, students would need to be in a computer lab or have individual access (mobile or laptop). In such a situation, I think the Google option is good. I especially like that it is not connected to PowerPoint. I certainly don't want to promote PPT unless necessary and done very well. Breaking up a presentation/discussion by going to the Google form, seems a good way to keep a variety of actions in a class.

slide it or write it?

2008-11-30T13:16:00.004-05:00

Posting early, because I'll be in the outdoors tomorrow, inclement weather or not. Count this one for Monday.

I've been reading slide:ology, a book about creating great presentations with PowerPoint, instead of the presentations we dread. Created by Nancy Duarte, of Duarte Design, the book has an engaging visual emphasis, and while most of the slide visuals would require a graphic designer, there is an interesting section on organizing elements to indicate the flow of information--with many, many graphic illustrations for just about any organization you can think of: process, hierarchy, flow, data, etc.

The argument is that our listeners are there to hear what we have to say, not to read it on or hear us read it from a slide. I couldn't agree more, yet, surely there is a difference between an educational lecture and a business speech.

I think we often create PPT slides to replicate what we would write on a board, saving that writing time to discuss the content. We might even have lines of text fly in one by one to simulate how we might have written and stopped to discuss each line. I liked and still like that kind of action in the classroom, because as I'm moving around, writing, pointing to key terms, I serve as a point of reference in the presentation of material, and I think it's easier to draw in responses from students, maybe because they are not intimidated as by a formally-prepared slide that seems to make pronouncements that students dutifully write down.

How can we recreate that kind of informal, thinking-on-the-fly dynamic of writing on the board in a PPT that is created and edited and beautified long before that moment in the classroom? I'm still looking for that kind of advice.

should you remove your talking head?

2008-11-21T10:49:00.011-05:00

My, that sounds a little painful, but it might be in your students' best interest.

There's been an interesting thread on the NMC (New Media Consortium) listserv (please read this post about our membership in the NMC) about whether a talking head in an online presentation--think Presenter or Connect--is a distraction to students/attendees.

[Removed a video of my own talking head for vanity reasons--bad lighting, etc. I was just musing about the value of my talking head in this post. Next time, I'll have my avatar speak.]

One argument cites this research on the eye movement of online viewers: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/video.html If the article research is true that watching is a passive mode, then we should think hard about whether the presence of the speaker's talking head creates a passive response instead of an active engagement with the presentation content. Of course, if the presentation is recorded, we have to work hard to make it interactive, but at the least, taking notes during the presentation, even if the slides are being copied, is active.

Anecdotally, I have, myself, been mesmerized by a talking head in a recorded presentation and missed some slide material, having to go back once I shook off the trance.

The counterargument refers to lecturers whose dynamic presence positively influences learning, but are we capturing that kind of presence with only a small talking head in a corner module? One post cites Richard Mayer's The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2005) as supporting little effect from the small head image. Another post cites and attaches one of Mayer's articles, "Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning" (Educational Psychologist 38(1): 43-52. © 2003, Erlbaum.), which discusses the possibility of cognitive overload in processing material in multimedia environments.

What do you think about all this as you struggle to create presentations? I'm wondering if we can have the talking head come in at appropriate moments--those moments when we might pause in the material and ask viewers a question to make them stop and think. In a recorded session, this could be during a poll or quiz. Or it could be a moment when you ask viewers to write a short response, one of several, all to be submitted to you after the entire presentation.

I'm not ready to say "off with their heads" yet, but neither do I think we should use them without due consideration of their effect.

there are Pilots and pilots

2008-11-21T08:00:00.003-05:00

You're all familiar with college pilots of technologies that are being considered for campus-wide adoption--those are the pilots with a capital P that seem to drag out over a good portion of a year, all with the best intentions, not necessarily in this order:

arrange with a company for a pilot
recruit volunteer faculty to participate
form a committee
train faculty
troubleshoot the technology
gather feedback from faculty and students
evaluate the technology
decide whether or not to commit to the technology

I'm surely leaving something out, but you know the process. Such a process is necessary for contracted technologies that are going to cost a pretty penny to implement.

Then there are the pilots that you might be implementing on your own from a wide choice of free Web 2.0 or Open Source tools. Certainly, it's not necessary for a college to go through a formal adoption strategy for a free tool--no money changes hands, and what works in your discipline and class might not be the best tool for the next person's class. We're missing the point of teaching creatively if we try to stifle creative experimentation with free tools.

That said, Ruth Reynard suggests that you can run your own pilot in your own classroom with these free tools, and that it becomes a good learning experience for your students to be involved in evaluating the effectiveness of the pilot with the small p. In "6 Ways not to become Rote Using Technology," Reynard suggests using a pattern of implementation similar to the one above, but more tailored to your course:

Get your hands dirty;
Set up the "pilot" parameters and criteria;
Involve the students in your reflective evaluation;
Always survey students about the technology specifically;
Always identify the connection with learning outcomes; and
Modify your use and adjust when needed (remain open to change).

I'm reminded of the EDUCAUSE surveys of students that reveal student preferences for technology that faculty know how to use well, and think this approach strikes a balance between the creative innovator and the expert. Capital P pilots aim for achieving a standard of expertise before implementation and lower-case p pilots engage students in innovation and evaluation of technology and learning. There is good cause for both to be happening.

What Web 2.0 tools have you tried out in your courses and to what success?

Image Author: Luca Cremonini Source: http://www.railsonwave.it/railsonwave/2007/1/2/web-2-0-map Original Source: Markus Angermeier Source: http://kosmar.de/archives/2005/11/11/the-huge-cloud-lens-bubble-map-web20/
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5

new job, new schedule

2008-11-19T09:23:00.001-05:00

...just to say that you can expect new posts every week on Monday and Friday. I know how easy it is to lose readership without regular posting, so I'll start this Friday.

In the meantime, here's one of my famous dogs (Shadow) asking for a handout:

You can vote for him here.

cartoon videos

2008-11-13T09:32:00.002-05:00

I think you knew after seeing my ToonDoo cartoons that I would be up for the next opportunity to create a little narrative, as long as I don't have to draw--that would be ugly!

From xtranormal.com comes my first film, Find the Secret:

reading makes me think too much

2008-11-06T16:15:00.000-05:00

Today I read a very short article in the new EDUCAUSE Review, "Moving Teaching and Learning with Technology from Adoption to Transformation." Joel L. Hartman suggests that a "systemic" approach to institutional adoption of technologies, rather than the "random acts of progress" that occur haphazardly, may be more likely to fulfill the dream of technology actually transforming education. I'd like to think that we are doing that here with the reorganization of the AECs at Tri-C, that by coordinating our efforts, we will make more progress toward excellence in teaching.

On the other hand, I don't completely want to stop those "random" experiments with new technologies, because there lies creativity and inspiration. I think we will find a balance of experimentation and systemic transformation.

Yesterday, I read "Exploring Faculty Learning Communities: Building Connections among Teaching, Learning, and Technology"--yes I read past the long title!--from the current issue of the IJTLHE. What inspires me here is the idea that such a community that meets regularly is more likely to go beyond mere introductions to technology to in-depth "considerations of effective pedagogy and critiques of . . . digital tools" (52). The article describes a Using Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning FLC at Virginia Commonwealth University. I recommend such groups, but I also recommend some different kinds of stand-alone workshops that delve into course design and developing outcomes that can be fulfilled by a technology.

watch this EDUCAUSE 2008 prez

2008-10-30T10:57:00.002-04:00

Here's a good presentation from EDUCAUSE 2008:

Update 10/31: I hope you took the 55 minutes to sit through this presentation, especially if you teach and are, as Robbins says, "in pain" about the loss of control of your students. She's right that we have to embrace new technologies and new ways of interacting with information or we will lose our students. And we don't want to lose them to their own devices without the necessary critical eye to evaluate and synthesize information.

And here at Tri-C, we must also help students without technological savvy to get up to speed, so that they can participate as fully as needed. That might mean adding a little skills training to your course or investigating existing offices that can teach skills to students or launching a good program of technology literacy.