Grid Knowledge

Social Media in (a small part of) the Academy

2012-01-04T21:51:00.000-08:00

Speaking to a colleague recently, she mentioned how technology at her Research 1 institution is changing the classroom. Not technology in FRONT of the class, nor technology acknowledged FROM the front of the class, but technology in the back (and middle) rows. Students who don't understand the professor are now putting in their ear phones and Googling the topic, looking for someone or some text that can explain what the instructor does not. They're setting up chat circles and exchanging information and explanations. They're seizing the knowledge in what my friend describes as a reshaping of the "authority of knowledge." When did this happen?

Instructors in smaller courses are retaliating. Ages ago we banned cell phones and texting, but now some are adding laptops to the banned list. No smart phones, no tablets, no laptops. "No knowledge for thee that is not from me." When did this happen?

I can't start my old rant regarding how change will happen with or without us. How society is asking for us to change: students with their ear plugs, parents with their rage, government with their cutbacks in funding, and society with its call for accountability. I can't go there. It makes me too sad. Instead of thumping that drum (again) I'll lead you down a more optimistic road: social media in our own research and scholarship. Crowd sourcing to meet our own ends: Google Scholar! Collaborative work documents with fellow researchers. E-Publishing, E-Reading, digital scholarship and resources. A significant body of the academy is discovering what their students have long been calling from the back rows: technology is rocking the academy. In a very good way.

But don't believe me. Check out this digital e-resource on the topic:

The (Coming) Social Media Revolution in the Academy

HE: Academy Awards for Learning Tools

2011-12-27T12:25:00.000-08:00

It may not seem to have the glamour of Hollywood, but many of us wait eagerly for Jane Hart's yearly top 100 Learning Tools list. My peeps and I use free, subscription and installed tools all year and then more than 500 of us vote on tools that made a difference in designing teaching and learning.

Many of the top tools have been the same for years, but perhaps this demonstrates how effectively some learning technologies are being adopted across curriculum, pedagogy, depth of technology infusion? Others are newcomers and may surprise you.

Granted, some seem a far stretch to be called a "learning tool" but Jane's definition is generously broad: "This could be a tool you use to create or deliver learning content/solutions for others, or a tool you use for your own personal learning," and the definition permits all of us all to stretch out of the "teaching and learning management" box. Thus, the rise of Twitter the last few years. Open, connected, social, constructed learning. Jane's yearly list always fills me with hope.

This year, you'll find much you'd expect and some new surprises. You'll be elated by the wealth of information derived from crowd-sourcing and feel dismay that there are so many tools/so little time to learn them all. Hurray to Jane for concisely sorting the votes and annotating the tools each year.

Bookmark her site. Capture the Top 100 link and go back to it again and again for just-in-time advice on a specific tool when you need it. As we enter 2012, may your life be filled with new ideas and possibilities as we collectively explore the learning design community's top 100 tools for 2011.

Happy grateful thankful learning

2011-11-23T09:55:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving Eve: So, I've been at my new school and my new job for a month, and now, I have to heartily agree with students who tell me that "learning is HARD!" It's also - when you're engaged in the doing - exhilirating, exhausting, exciting, satisfying, and consuming. I've learned so much the last month and I don't even know how we'd go about assessing the learning. I've learned systems and culture and processes and people at UWT. I'm learning where we have challenges and where I might contribute.

I've learned about the landscape and history of Tacoma. I'm learning how to be a stranger in a strange land of the winter rain forest after living my entire adult life in the desert. I'm learning to drive my stick shift Mini on very steep hills. I'm learning by doing. And doing most of it alone. I've learned that I'm stronger, more organized, and have more resilience than I could have imagined.

So, where's this all going on the GridKnowledge blog? If this is the place I capture new ideas for higher education, what have I learned that I can share?

Be fearless. The dividends are huge.
Be open. People don't notice wrinkles as a sign of age. Instead, they notice your willingness to learn, adapt, listen and grow as a sign of youth.
Be digital. Store your knowledge in the brains of friends and colleagues that share. Google wisely. Follow the right people on Twitter. Use an RSS feed and skim the blogs of people you admire. Share and share alike.

Products of the above?

There's a great new faculty resource coming out of the Teaching and Learning Center at UWT. A small group on campus, dedicated to assessment, was granted a bit of money from the UWT Founder's Fund to capture best practices in classroom assessment. Check out the Assessment Toolkit Site they set up and pick one, just one, excellent new practice to try in your classroom or online.
The University of Washington is thoughtfully and methodically evaluating the new platform that they've chosen as the next generation learning management system: Canvas, by Instructure. I now have a site in development, and am finding much that is lovely and very thoughtful in the architecture of this LMS. UW has gone to much effort to construct a help site for the rollout, which is currently being done in a limited pilot to best get rich feedback and support systems in place before production. It seems faculty at UW have waited a long time for a centrally-supported LMS and perhaps, with the choice of a very innovative system, it will have been worth the wait.
BEST for last: I learned that Google released their Scholar Citations this month! W00t! Yay! Hurray! I love love love those guys. Here's my profile. It took me about four minutes to set up. Seriously, this will change much of the way academics publish their citations, not to mention finding like-minded colleagues and new research ideas. Thank you, Google!
Want to get started? Here's the entry page.
At UWT and want some help? Kelly Fitzgerald and I will be doing a workshop Dec 7-8 at lunch to share hints, explore use, talk about incorporating into UWT faculty profiles. Stop in.

I have to quit now. There's so much more to learn and I'm off to do just that. Happy, grateful, joyful Thanksgiving!

A myth and a hoax

2011-11-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a spot-on, "babies need milk" Chronicle article posted recently on The Myth of the Tech-Savvy Student.

Conclusion I draw from the piece: we've said it often and long enough that it should be a given in higher education:

we have an obligation to ensure that our students graduate with a digital literacy
that literacy should not be assumed or confused with an ease from technologies built on games, smartphones, iPods, or electronic texting and shopping
thoughtful technology should be infused throughout the curriculum
thoughtful leadership should be insisting on digital literacy with the same commitment we put into writing and critical thinking. (Don't get me started on our neglect of quantitative literacy; that's a whole new blog post.)
it should happen yesterday!

But, as the article points out, the majority of HE faculty (and certainly the ones with tenure and the most power in defining curriculum), are aging baby boomers who keep a distance from the fast-paced changing world of technology. They tell students that laptops aren't allowed in class. They suggest that Google is not to be used to double-check or refute the spoon-fed, expert knowledge they are imparting to the students via their lecture. They deny the value of crowd-sourced knowledge. They use the LMS in uninteresting and classroom-replicating ways. They disagree with everything the digital generation believes to be true about collective and participatory knowledge and learning.

They miss a great opportunity to teach, to define a scholarly approach to digital skill-building, to give our learners the tools and skills they'll need for the world we will all be facing.

Our students may be gadget-savvy, but most of them are not yet digitally literate. Neither are the faculty. If one wanted to start somewhere to begin thinking about what digital literacy might look like, one would try the mother of crowd-sourced knowledge, Wikipedia and notice how sad their section on digital literacy in education appears. WE could change that, if we tried.

Why I Love Online Learning

2011-10-22T22:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.parentscountdowntocollegecoach.com/

My first week at the amazing, lovely and vibrant UWT ended with a presentation to the faculty on - what else? - Why I Love Online Learning! Putting my cards on the table, letting them know who I am, what I do, and how I can help move new technologies into the curriculum if they love online learning too.

And how I love not only online learning, but all kinds of online learning. LMS, PLE, social, collaborative, reflective, asynchronous, hybrid, new remote communication possibilities, and more. Here, there, and in new ways of teaching and learning in the classroom.

We did a break-out after my brief #show&tell and it seems I have collaborators and doubters. But the doubters were kind and articulate ("It's the Tacoma way!").

So, what did I tell them about WHY?

Not just because I'm a technology monkey ("Ooh, pretty new bright shiny object. Oh wait! Look! Another pretty new bright shiny object!")
And not just because online learning has changed so much and so inventively in the last few years.
And not just because the LMS has changed how quickly and strategically we can deliver consistent, quality learning experiences.

No, not just for those reasons. More importantly, for the reasons to the right. We are a nation going to college, and the new, "traditional" student is not the student of the past. The students we see today don't always love the classroom ("always" being generous here), They don't value the lecture format, don't crave text-heavy learning experiences, and don't take pride in the carefully crafted/APA format/scholarly essay. They don't live on campus, work few hours, or have time to kill.

And not many of them make it to graduation. Students enter with high hopes, but a recent report suggests that the US spent 4 BILLION over 5 years on community college students who dropped out the first year. It's better, but not good at the 4-year institutions. Students are going increasingly into debt ($100 billion in student debt??) just to find that they weren't prepared. Not for the cost, the rigor, the time, the effort needed. Approximately 50% of them will leave with great debt and little learning to show for it.

Something must change. WE must change. We need to use the tools and resources now available to create new learning experiences that are accessible, affordable, flexible, engaging, and relevant to the new learner (all of us, all ages, all races, all economic levels) as s/he comes to us with faith, heart, hope in hand. We can change the numbers above because we now have the tools.
And that's why I love online learning!

Six Tips on Doing Research in Graduate School

2011-10-05T01:07:00.000-07:00

Google Scholar and bit of RefWorks

Packing up for new beginnings in Tacoma. One of my last projects at ASU was to do a few talks on research and scholarship for graduate students here at the College of Public Programs. 21st century learners need 21st century tools. Our lives changed with the rapid transition to the information age. So did our scholarship. Students need digital help to find, evaluate, capture, sort, and re-find knowledge they need.

So, kudos to the School of Social Work at CoPP that brought me in (along with a number of other important resources) for a Graduate Student Success Day. What I said, in a nutshell, with some pics: "Smart is no longer what you know. It's how quickly you can find and effectively evaluate what you need to know, when you need to know it." My talk was about tools that help us do that.

Here's a quick animated (Flash) summary explaining how and an accompanying text summary below:

1) Use Google Scholar
2) Get to Google Scholar by entering through the Library page, so that it is Library aware

3) Set your library and bibliographic manager choices in Scholar Preferences

4) Use RefWorks to quickly capture annotated bibliographies, effectively storing part of your brain (the part you'd forget or lose in a heap of paper) in the cloud.

5) When writing your papers, use RefWorks to create your bibliographic citations on the fly by moving your citations to a temporary folder as you write and producing bibliography to paste at end

6) Serious scholars should take the time to download and learn to use Write N' Cite, the free software that plugs into MS Word, making it RefWorks aware. Write your papers this way for maximum effectiveness.

Despite your faculty never telling you about them. Have a heart...tell your faculty. Scholarship entered the 21st century of digital access while we napping. And that's where Google Scholar rocks. Using the same ranking and referral logic it applies to its search engine, it finds and RANKS scholarly resources on the topic of your search. This is a game changer. Students no longer wander through library online resources, wasting time reading crud. They're directed straight to the most significant resources of that topic, and shown the number of scholarly sources that cited that piece.

AND that's just the start, but sadly it's where those who have discovered Google Scholar often stop. At my seminars on scholarship, I talk about the importance of setting your Scholar Preferences.

Scholar Preferences: click the little wheel at the top right of most browsers when you're in Google Scholar. There's a preference, called Library Links, that allows you to choose and access your own University Library's online resources so that you can click in, authenticate, read the article online. (Many/most scholarly resources still aren't free without subscription. Setting preferences for your own University Library lets you in directly.)

Don't stop there. At the bottom of the page, there's another preference for Bibliography Manager. You need one. Good University Libraries support RefWorks, which I happen to believe is the slickest and most customer friendly scholarly tool out there. If you've wandered to this blog from somewhere outside HE, there are free bibliographic managers, like Zotero, or one-time purchase ones like Endnote (which Scholar also supports) but when a University pays BUNDLES for a RefWorks license, it is a great gift to scholars and you should learn to use it.

So, use Google Scholar preferences. Set your prefs so that you can access materials from your Library with one-click and import into your RefWorks account with one-click. It will save you countless hours in front-end finding and storing. Import and annotate every article you read, when you're reading it.

On to RefWorks. If you don't have an account, go get one. Capture annotations, great quotes, search terms in your annotation and note fields. You'll forget what you read, but RefWorks will remember and retrieve it when you need it. Thus, making you 21st century smart.

I'll stop there as RefWorks is supported by the Library and the librarians offer support and training. But they might not show you how to set up Google Scholar so here you go. Happy trails, do good and do great research!

Happy Trails and Endless Learning Adventures

2011-08-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard yet, I'm packing my bags and heading west. I'm not stopping till I hit the Puget Sound in beautiful Tacoma, WA. After 20 years in the Sonoran desert, I'll be embracing rain forest where I'll join the University of Washington Tacoma as Assistant Chancellor of Instructional and Learning Technologies.

It was a very hard decision until I got there for a visit. A gorgeous campus, constructed from century-old historic warehouses, saved and transformed into amazing classrooms and collaborative learning spaces. A beautiful town that is rich with history, culture, green, the Sound, parks, distinct neighborhoods, and what seems to be an engaged, blue-state group of people. I think I can be happy there and change will do me good. Besides, there is increasing evidence that embracing change helps you live a long, healthy, active life. Time for me go.

Mostly, of course, I'm heading to Tacoma for the job. I'll have an opportunity to work with open, committed faculty and wonderful IT groups both at Tacoma and the centralized UW technologies at Seattle. Great resources are in place to create amazing e-learning environments. With these resources in place (nothing outsourced!) and a caring, learning-centered culture, I'll be at the corner of Commerce and Easy Street. All it will take to infuse technology into that mix is effort, passion, research and a few good ideas. W00t!

Final draw: the Chancellor at UWT, Debra Friedman, shares my vision of a HE that needs to adapt to the changing population now entering college and the changing needs of the society that awaits them. She wants me to help all willing faculty of the campus create learning that engages students not just a few hours a week in a classroom, but 24/7 whenever and wherever the learner is best able to engage. She wants programs that will serve the nearby military base so that Lewis-McChord soldiers don't have to end their education when they ship out. (Serve those who serve us.) She understands how hard it is for the nearby reservations to send their leadership away for an education when they're so deeply needed at home. She knows some learners don't thrive in a classroom but love to learn and deserve to have their needs respected in the educational system. She knows older learners have commitments that often preclude the standard "butt in seat" classroom time-measure of an education.

All this as way of explaining the where and why regarding announcement of leaving my beloved desert and ASU's fascinating, NASCAR-like experiment in transforming higher education. Kudos for creating a bold, brawny (perhaps a bit brutish) New American University. It's been amazing. I was here 20 years, I did my best, and now it's time to go. Happy trails. Do good, be good, be fearless, and have buckets of fun. Come visit in Tacoma!

eLearning? iLearning? oLearning? What??

2011-07-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

My head is spinning. My professional body is losing it's connection to the earth. I swear this story is true. At ASU, they now divide online courses into i-Courses (traditional-program students taking internet courses) and o-Courses (online-program students taking internet courses). Students who normally register on their own without problem are now lining up outside advisors' offices, physically and virtually. Online and on-ground. On-phone and on-form. They're confused by the vowels. They want a course. Taught by their favorite professor. It's in the schedule of classes. They can't take it?

No, they're an i. It's an o. They're an o, it's and i. It's a mess. And it doesn't help that every school or program interpreted the i-o vowel memo differently, and so each program labels the course designations differently.

Wait, we haven't even started with the head-spin and body levitation yet. What IF same favorite instructor as above offers an e-course (my own neutral term), and their program WANTS to offer this course via the internet to ground-students and to online-students? They want the instructor to teach it only once. Well, the instructor must open TWO sections for that same course, so that the administrators can keep separate count of the students. I swear this is true. Students in the same degree program, taking the same online course, divided by whether they live near campus or not.

It's my job to explain the logic of this decision to faculty and to help them step through the maze of creating two sections but one online experience. And it gets worse. The administrators of ASU Online (administrators that support the Schools' fully online programs--the o-students) chose a different LMS than ASU's Blackboard; they chose Pearson eCollege Learning Studio. A house divided by a platform for which Pearson can't even decide on a name. Pearson? eCollege? Learning Studio? You choose. No one knows.

Still, this is not the problem. Like Valdemort, an LMS need not be named. We know it's there; the name is minor. The real hurdle for instructors is that they have used Blackboard for a very long time and are told (often very late in the game) that they need to use the LMS with confused name because o-students will be in the course. Thus, if the i-students take the class, they must experience the LMS they've never seen before so that o-students will not. Small worry that the instructor must teach in an LMS they've never seen before.

Caveat: What if it's an i-course (not an o-course) and an advisor decides that it's needed by an o-student to graduate or to meet a pre-requisite? Then, without the extra o-section or o-LMS, the advisor sneaks the o-student in the i-course. And guess what? Just as in busing in the 60s, the e-learners (my vowel again) get along fine.

Change is hard. In a culture-bound institution, it's much harder than it needs to be. But bless our administrators' hegemonic hearts, they ARE trying. (Students and faculty would say that they are VERY trying.) On the bright side, whether named with an i, an o, an e...more fully digital e-courses are appearing each term. And our students are lining up to take them.

Talk to Me! Click. Vote. Tweet.

2011-06-27T15:20:00.001-07:00

One of the culture shocks experienced while offering workshops to Chinese students at Sias International University was the silence out there. They didn't ask questions. They didn't want to answer questions when asked. Turns out they didn't want to embarrass ME in case I didn't know the answer. I explained that American professors are comfortable not knowing the answer, and we encourage questions.

Now, I'm thinking, I didn't quite tell the truth. OK, I hope that I told a theoretical truth, but in practice, we know we're generally asking the few, eager, extroverted, usually attention-seeking students in the front rows. We know their questions and we know our answers. What if we really did want students in the back rows to let us know what they don't understand? There are new and interesting ways to ask them, even in large lectures and I'd like to think aloud about a few of them.

First, the infamous "clickers" or more formally "classroom response systems" (CRS). Clickers can be a great way to get low-stake feedback. For those new to these hand-held gadgets, here's Wired's take on the subject. But, the classroom setup and the individual devices can be both pricey and hard to manage. Too often purchased by the students and poorly used by the instructor, the cost and cumbersome management can cause some resentment.

Some say the technology is not the pedagogy, and all we really need is fingers or paper. Anyone who knows me would predict that I'd easily agree with first statement, but think the absence of anonymity in public voting with fingers means you sacrifice honest and unworried responses. There is great value in digital voting, especially when used to "talk back", to tell me what was understood, to share confusion and give me a chance to see where I got it wrong in teaching. For that, I love all the instant voting/digital tools. And if the voting can leverage gadgets already in the students' pockets? Bonus.

So I want to mention PollEverywhere, which is a great alternative to clickers. Web-based, it allows students to respond to questions via whatever they have: smart phone text, Twitter, Web page. It allows us to leverage what our students carry AND ask them what is not known. I like the low stakes entry, as the software offers free polling when asking for less than 30 responses. Instructors can test in small courses or in doing group work, and if you love it, ask your director/dean/CIO to purchase a site license for unlimited responses. It changes the large lecture experience.

Another way in to the participatory learner is to use Twitter via SAP's interactive PowerPoint Twitter tool. Ask students to create a Twitter account and send you Tweets that are compiled dynamically right in your PowerPoint presentation. I love this plugin, and have found it invaluable in teaching and in presentation settings where I know a number of people would otherwise be zoning out.

It occurs to me that "blended learning" could also be used to describe a F2F class that logs into webinar software (Adobe Connect, WebEx, GoToMeeting, ... you choose) and make use of the chat, poll, discussion notes feature of real-time participation.

Lots of choices. We'd be using them if we really want to "know that our students know what we need them to know" (Tom D'Angelo). All of them would tell us. If we asked the right questions. In the right way for our increasingly diverse learners. Assessment amplified, and delivered via a plethora of software and devices now found in our pockets, backpacks, app-ready devices.

China!

2011-06-17T15:15:00.001-07:00

Not a standard topic for Grid Knowledge, but I did go for a symposium on creating positive change, so I'm making the leap that anyone interested in emerging trends will be fascinated by the sites, smells, sounds and solutions now seen in the world's new super-power.

Amazing, astounding, breath-taking. A new China. It was an enchanting trip, better told with 100 pictures than 1,000 words so here's my Picassa sets semi-sorted and labelled:

Sias and the World Academy for the Future of Women Symposium
Xi'an and the Terra Cotta Warriors
Beijing
Shanghai
The Shaolin Temple, birthplace of Kung Fu, and high in the mountains near Zhengzhou.

Now the words, for there are so many stories and so much learned:
At Sias International University (site of the WAFW symposium), I saw college students studying from 6am til 11pm. At Xi'an, I saw a city weaving it's place as ancient city with a new focus on smart industry.

In Beijing, I saw a city reinventing itself overnight. Light rail anywhere you might want to go, installed in a few short years. (In Phoenix, we fight for years to run one short line and still quibble over the value of public transportation in a West owned by the wealthiest drivers.) Beijing was Ming's Tomb and the Forbidden City; the Summer Palace and lessons from Dr. Tea. It was the crazy, all-night "walking street" of food and trinkets and treasures. It was elegant meals and live centipedes eaten on a stick. It was breath-taking.

In Shanghai, oh the sites and sounds and smells and markets and gardens. They say Beijing is China's DC and Shanghai is the mainland's New York City. I suppose that's right. It was exciting from early morning till I couldn't keep my eyes open at night. It was Old Town Shanghai and endless skyscrapers; the public gardens and the crowded, colorful markets; it was high culture and all-night massage shops. It was a shopper's dream, and although I am NOT a shopper, I couldn't resist visiting the beautiful pearl and silk markets and the not-legal designer back alley stores. I loved it all, spent too much, ate almost everything (rank, "stinky tofu", yes; live centipedes on sticks...no). It was my favorite city because I was there with my friend Elena Zee, where she was raised and her family showed me more kindness than I deserved. Plus, I got my colleague and symposium travel partner/pal, Kathy Puckett, to come with me - so even the travel from Beijing (including missed connections and 24-hr layovers) was a lifetime memory of fun.

I can't begin to describe how little I understood what Fareed Zakaria speaks of when he writes about "Post American World 2.0" until I saw China with my own eyes. There, children in kindergarten are learning English. The government is moving to create a strong, modern infrastructure. The people have a hope, energy and enthusiasm about the future that the USA seems to have surrendered to bickering and internal discord. There is excitement in the streets and people do their best or "eat bitter" without complaint, working to create something new.
I want that for my people as well. I want that for students at ASU. I want that love of the future to exist in me.

Not that it was all good. Many believe it's moving too fast, and there are consequences to ignoring problems with environment, growth, relocation, and the taste of capitalism becoming a hunger incompatible with a firm, Communist government. There's also Tibet, Mongolia and the Western China regions beginning to raise up and ask for recognition of identity. We don't hear much about this, and the Chinese hear less, but it's happening. Because the 21st Century is a new time and a new story for China.

It went by too fast: I saw so much, learned so much, have already forgotten too much. I have to go back, and travel that massive landscape more slowly. Till then, my memories are recorded in piles of digital shapes and colors up at Picassa. They're only a poor simulcra of my experiences over 17 days, 5 cities...but it's a start.

Revisiting Plagiarism

2011-05-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

In an age when collaboration, teaming and consensus-based decisions become more important and emphasized in the work place, incorporating these practices into meaningful assessment continues to challenge higher education. How do we know that our students know what we need them to know?

Adding to the challenge, thoughtful instructors attempting to foster digital literacy and the use of technology in rich ways in the course experience find that the most effective tools also make it easier for learners to "collaborate" where not intended by the instructor.

One of the most challenging tools for instructors is the use of online testing. The affordances include the ability to offer more small tests with lower stakes because the burden of grading is lightened. But how do we know they're not cheating??

In "traditional", face-to-face courses, online tests also save valuable class time both in delivery and in eliminating paper return. And they include the value to the student of instant feedback on understanding. The consequences of this transfer of exams to the digital space means we hear more stories of extending study groups to the exam taking. Students gather, enter the exam, and compare responses. Many honestly are surprised when "caught" and informed this is not allowed.

Here, the burden has to lie with the instructor who assumes their notion of assessment and ethical behavior is the same for the students. Unless directly stated in the syllabus or in the directions for the test, collaborating on an assessment may not be wrong in the eyes of the students. If the instructor believes it is wrong, they need to state that. And, once stated, if the instructor realizes that their values and ideas on assessment is not the same as that of many students, the instructor has a number of options. Electronic options; not whining like the crazy fellow in Florida because students had access to a large pool of possible questions and studied them all.

Keeping up with practices seen, technology enables an instructor to prevent collaboration as surely as it enables the learners to compare answers. Especially if the LMS is Blackboard with its plethora of unused assessment options. Creating an exam using a) randomized questions, b) randomized answers, c) pools where each student gets a different set of questions, and d) multiple formats for questions makes it very, very hard for students to compare questions during a timed test. Ok, there's a bit of a tech challenge in setting up these options as each is done in a different place when creating the exam, but ASU has some very good documentation and how to do it, and if you run into trouble, "operators are standing by" to help! Here's a start:

How to set up a pool
How to display random order of questions in test creation settings
How to display random order of answers in deployment settings

Digging deeper, Tom Angelo would ask if the assessment is being used to effectively improve student learning and would suggest we do much more with the technology. Used thoughtfully, electronic assessment enables students to learn more, learn deeply and to create a formative, lasting understanding of the course material. Instead of cursing the technology that creates a different kind of assessment, why not leverage online assessment to allow the student to try and try again to improve their understanding (and score) and to be better prepared for the next course, the next level, the next step in life?

Along with the randomized questions and unique question pools, Blackboard allows a) multiple attempts, b) accepting the highest attempt, and c) many, many formats of questions. Designing an assessment that allows students to examine, modify, and demonstrate what they have learned has never been easier. Leveraging technology in building assessments takes a bit of work up front but provides great return on investment. Tom Angelo would be proud.

Hot off the presses: Horizon Report 2011

2011-02-15T12:54:00.000-08:00

Eagerly awaited each year, the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report is out! I don't always agree, as I'm more of an affordance and value fanatic than the techie types that work very hard to come to consensus here. Still, each year I eagerly await, digitally rip open, and comb their effort to "identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education."

Work hard they do, and always come up with some provoking, leading-edge, out-there technologies that will (they claim) influence how we incorporate technology into higher education initiatives. Check it out and see how some of us will be teaching 1, 2-3, 4-5 years up the road.

With eBooks, mobile devices, augmented reality, gaming, gesture-based computing and even incorporating learner analytics into the stew, there's a lot to consider in this release.

Note on the analytics bandwagon that so few understand but lots are tossing about:

We should start a drinking game for each time we see 'analytics' used to mean something else. Like assessment. Or data analysis. Or accountability. But the Horizon Report has good intention and some reason to suggest accountability and results will be demanded of HE up ahead. Kudos to them, even if the mentioned emerging technology is not about learning and/or analytics and/or emerging technology at all. Not at all. For more on my rant on this topic see recent article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly re Nudge Analytics)

So, could all these hot technologies wind up in the HE teaching and learning stew within next few years? It could happen. Will any of them be the disruptive innovation that changes the "industry" for the better? Not likely. I think that's eLearning, or the market-driven/customer culture of the new proprietary schools, but that's another post.

Read the Horizon Report!

Learning and eLearning

2011-01-28T08:35:00.000-08:00

My expert opinion: learning is funky. No one seems to understand it. As Sly Stone says, "One child grows up to be somebody that just loves to learn/And another child grows up to be/ Somebody you'd just love to burn. "And when you're all grown up, learning and the willingness to change, grow, be wrong...becomes funkier.

For a very long time, I've made claims that technology and its "just in time" and personalized learning affordance has created a love of learning that we've never seen before, learning we understand even less. eLearning: obsessive, compulsive, all-the-time learning that creates passionate communities and keeps you up half the night clicking and commenting; changing, growing, adapting...learning. I've seen it in the work of my students and in my own life and work.

Elder faculty poo-poo it (technical term) and tell me that "it can't reproduce the magic of the classroom." I quietly mutter that there was seldom magic there for me (but oh you Google!) and attempt to show them the evidence.

I use scholarly evidence that eLearning is "just as good" (see No Significant Difference). It quiets them down, but never made enough sense to me. If researchers are finding no significant difference, they're measuring wrong. There IS a difference, and it's ownership, engagement, collaboration, being heard. I know that. I feel it. I see it in my students. I just don't know how to measure it.

But we see it all the time, and others are beginning to describe it. Chris Anderson of TED describes it in relation to internet-taught shifts and crowd accelerated innovation. New ideas are spreading and changing and transforming in rapidly adapted new memes via the Web. People are spreading ideas by finding like-minded explorers and exchanging links, creating content, inventing on top of what came before. Young people are learning new ways of being in the world by learning from each other via the Web. Young people are changing disciplinary practice by , tossing out what has been and demonstrating what could be.

The world of finance changed thanks to two young women who (separately) believed in microfinance and created Kiva.org (Jessica Jackley) and the Acumen Fund (Jacqueline Novagratz). Their new way of thinking CHANGED the lives of millions and changed my belief that there was little I could do.

The world of dance CHANGED due to young, untrained dancers learning moves from each other via YouTube videos. No one who's ever watched Lil Demon or the YouTube trained and promoted dancers of LXD doubts this regardless of measure. Crowd-accelerated access to evidence, crowd-supported desire to learn, the crowd shining light on your passion. Via the Internet.

Now, the dark and sad secret of my own passion: I am in a field that still rejects the open light that drives crowd accelerated innovation and love of deep learning. Education lags behind open source, open learning, open access. More and more young people love learning, hate school. But eLearning can change that. We can change that.

eLearning peeps: keep fighting that good fight. Let's keep posting the clips, showing the evidence. Let's find better ways to measure besides citing the numbers that are deserting the F2F experience for online programs. Let's continue to create and spread innovative practice. And let's keep posting great evidence like Chris Anderson's TED talk on crowd accelerated innovation.

Still working with scholarly types who like text better? Ask them to subscribe to Wired Magazine and read about these ideas. Or...tell them to read about crowd learning and innovation in Wired's story on the Web!

We're the teacher and the student and the crowd: plug in, teach, learn, transform the world. eLearning rocks!

Wicked Wicked Problem of Learning in the Digital Age

2010-12-13T11:50:00.001-08:00

Finals week. Campus is already quieting down as learners and faculty head out for winter break. As we close up, I've decided that the theme of 2011 here at GridKnowledge will be wicked problems (see Rittel and Melvin 1972, and Conkel 2005 or heck, just go to Wikipedia).

Wicked: what we have in higher education as we drag ourselves into the digital age. We're a poster child of a wicked problem regarding our work infusing digital literacy into the HE experience.

Wicked: tough to understand let alone solve, dynamic/ shifting/ elusive, no stopping rules, lots of possible paths to solution. The second wicked of title comes in the resistance to change we're seeing in so many HE stakeholders who just want the world to stay the way it was just moments ago when we were kings of an industrial age and HE was revered through the land.

Maybe I should add a third wicked related to wicked #2: we have a new generation of learners (choose your pocket: X,Y,Z, D+, or iGen) that will NOT have the skills they need to face the next 15-20 jobs/distinct careers ahead of them when they leave the halls of the Academy. We like to pretend that our younger, wealthier learners (sorry you returning and less early-advantaged souls) already "get it," but as a technology researcher and an instructor, I can tell you that they don't.

Sure they FB and FourSquare and 18% of them now Twitter (welcome and what took you so long?). They check for updates and comments on their social plans, bored and disengaged, while we lecture in big, face-forward classrooms. They text and they upload pics taken with their cell phone. Many do so inappropriately and publicly. Many have no idea how to use these digital skills in academic or professional ways. When attempting to think about how they might leverage technology to learn, they experience information overload and frustration. Shirky claims overload is merely poor filters- but WHERE will these generations learn about filters, synthesis, skeptical reflection if not from their experience here?

I see most of my colleagues in HE abdicating any responsibility for the lack of preparation in basic educated digital literacy while we continue our hold-the-line protection of lecture, text, expert, listen to ME culture. ("Only people not like you are experts or should be cited. Wikipedia is not scholarly. Shared knowledge is suspect. The written text is our medium.") I see the business community losing faith in our intentions. I see a government that publicly states the need for a good HE system in the US, but lacks the will to demand or finance one. I see graduates returning to ask me what they should major in next so that they're actually prepared for what's out there. "I see dead practice everywhere," as M Night Shyamalan might say.

We've got wicked, wicked wicked problems to solve and if I thought about it, I'd probably add a few more wickeds. I'm thinking about it in 2011. My new year's resolution, affirmation and promise in the time I have left here. Happy holidays, see you next year!

ASU End of Semester: Posting Final Grades - With a Little Help

2010-12-08T09:45:00.001-08:00

The wonderful thing about digital information is the just in timeliness of finding what you need when you need it. Still, much research suggests that we prefer to reach out to colleagues, friends, and trusted resources when looking for specific information rather than Google the hodge-podge of sometimes wrong-headed help files on the ASU Web site. Perhaps that's what Joe Cocker meant when he said "I get by with a little help from my friends."

Thus, instructors (many teaching larger enrollment courses in past semesters) are now wandering into the halls here at ASU asking "Does anyone remember how to submit Roster Grades from Blackboard??" The information is out there, but not easy to find, and not completely helpful, so after walking numerous colleagues through the process in preparation for the crunch, I'm posting a summary here.

To automatically send your final grades from Blackboard to Roster Grades, you'll need to:

- create a letter grade total column in Blackboard. Instructions here, at the BB help site, for creating a total column. Remember to choose "primary display = letter"

Then follow the ASU Roster Grades Instructions page embedded deep in BB help files:

- designate your created column as the external grade column to export (#1 on ASU Instructions page)

- verify that the Blackboard default letter grade conversion scale is same as your scale (#2 on ASU Instructions page)

- export your BB grades (#4 on Instructions page)

- verify and post grades in Roster grades (#5 on Instructions page)

Note: Ignore step #3 in ASU Instructions. It assumes you're giving up your BB total-pts column after converting the column to a letter grade. You do NOT have to sacrifice this column (an important record) to post grades.

Yes, there are a few steps to muddle through, but much much faster than posting each grade by hand. Congratulations on making it through another semester. Hopefully, you were able to do it with a little help from your friends.

Flip that Lecture

2010-10-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

Yeay, Karl Fisch! You go where few have gone before. Karl says STOP LECTURING YOUR STUDENTS and let them learn. Flip the Lecture notion: let your students watch lecture videos at home before the class.

In class: help them, work with them, engage them. Here's the whole story, as told by Daniel Pink (you know, A Whole New Mind, Drive...).

Now, of course I loved the story because I am a strong advocate for killing the lecture. It's not how most of us learn, despite how much teachers love to do it. When a rare teacher embraces the anti-lecture with videos (especially if the videos are then done in short, topical bites like the beloved Sal Khan - yes, beloved by me and many learning designers and funding agencies), then we have a thing of beauty.

The real fun, and added extra in the story, includes the fact that Pink isn't a learning designer, he's a societal scanner so his approach is Flip Thinking everywhere. Yeay to that too. Go Dan!

Nudge Analytics: Knowing and Doing

2010-09-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

Things often take time to brew. Awhile back, an economist colleague of mine, Dr. Phil Mizzi, turned me on to Nudge, the work of Thaler and Sunstein (2008) on how a nudge in the right direction can subtly influence people to make good decisions. Their idea was to define a framework for choice architecture that takes into consideration the humanness of people, and how easy it is to not make decisions. When given free will, people often choose not by not choosing. Not to save, not to take care of their health, not to do simple personal, tiny things to protect the common good. In Nudge, the authors look at the economic benefits of nudging people to do the right thing.

A few years later, Phil and I can't help noting how machines have advanced in not just gathering data, but searching for patterns and noting significance. Decision architecture suddenly becomes much easier by eliminating the human-intensive intervention described in Nudge, but also becomes more reliable regarding the architecture piece of the choice architecture puzzle. In the authors' examples, someone is deciding the value and parameters of the nudge, rather than allowing analytics to gather, sort, compare, contrast and determine the objectivity of the nudge toward good. In one example, the authors describe a Save More Tomorrow plan that a number of corporations have implemented to help their employees save money through voluntarily auto-deduction. The authors state that thousands of corporations now use this nudge model, with triple the savings seen previously. But even economists can't tell a company what percent of salary best balances nudge vs. return. Why not let a machine do that? Across an institution or a multi-institutional study, machines could pattern-match and adjust recommended percent that would encourage participation at best savings rate. Nudge analytics: No guessing; no assumptions; no bias.

Close to home, the implications and affordances are deep when we think about the wasted information available in current university systems. The machine knows how many times students log into ALL the sections of ENG 101 in Blackboard. The machine knows the final grade of each of these students. The machine knows what percentage of students that login twice a week receive an A. Not many is our guess, but the machine doesn't have to guess. The machine could send out a note to the student's portal page or email on a weekly basis, letting the student know the likelihood that they'll receive an A based on their performance, matched against historical data. The machine could nudge the student to log in more often and raise their likelihood.

And that's just one idea from our own backyard. Starting to obsess on the idea, I'm beginning to see nudge analytics pop up in the most interesting places. Recently, with days to spare before the early voting sign up closes for the November election, I received an email from Organizing for America (President Obama's initiative to encourage citizens to vote) that is a perfect example of nudge analytics. The letter reminded me of the importance of my vote, and just let me know that AZ has a site online that takes moments to sign up to be on the Permanent Early Voter List.

I was nudged. My decision, my choice, just a nudge to be a better citizen. I gave that example to one of the intrepid reporters at InsideAZPolitics.com, and they put up the story and the link to AZ PEVL.

Consider their story, and this blog ending, a simple nudge. If you're as lazy, harried, stressed or forgetful as most of us, consider voting early. Sign up at the PEVL site before Monday to early vote by mail-in ballot in November. If you miss the deadline, sign up in time for the next local election.

Nudge analytics on the part of the machines at Organizing for America; just a simple, Thaler and Sunstein type nudge from me and InsideAZPolitics.com. Sign up. Know, then do. It'll be a decision that's good for the common good.

BB9: Top Ten Responses to the New Look

2010-09-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

Blackboard 9 FAQ for Fall 2010

We're up! A new year at ASU and we've moved to BB9. After 2 weeks of crash and burn, the system seems stable. New instructors are signing up for workshops, searching the Blackboard site for startup guides, taking training classes and asking for help.

Experienced instructors, aren't quite as prepared. They left campus in the Spring with their course copy requests submitted and now, thinking all is right with the world, are once again attempting to get into their BB8 shells. And guess what? They're stumped. Something familiar was taken away and now they're strangers in a strange, oddly familiar and yet mysterious land.

So, based on the 50+ email messages and 12 angry phone calls left for me in the last 48 hours, I appealed to the instructional designers of ASU to compile a quick Top 10 list of BB9 queries. The Training Group at our ASU University Technology Office came through, kindly including a number of suggestions from the faculty of CoPP, adding some they've heard (very helpful, as I hadn't heard those yet...or discovered the solutions) and here you have the collective hive-mind confusion made less confusing. Check it out!

Blackboard 9 FAQ for Fall 2010

And in case you haven't seen their most excellent Blackboard 9 Instructor Help Site, please check that out too. A wealth of resources, tips, answers, ideas. Again, BB9 is admittedly not the most intuitive interface, and ASU got off to a rocky start, but BB9 is here to stay and has a lot under the hood. Visit the help sites, explore, get over our collective crankiness and use technology effectively to make teaching and learning an engaging, meaningful experience. Cuz that's why we're here. Have a great semester!

BB9 Redux: Posting Video links

2010-09-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

Beginning of semester and ASU goes live with Blackboard Learn. Most faculty here will readily tell you this is a misnomer at our site as it's been down a good deal of the time since the semester started two weeks ago. But let's put that aside and talk about how very different BB9 is and how a few aspects are seemingly not possible in BB9 that were simple in previous versions. This is not to negate a few exciting new features, but focusing today on VIDEO. Especially the desire to stay within the BB environ while watching the video. It used to be rather straightforward to 'Create Item' and choose 'Display media file within the page'. But that was then, and this is BB 9. (ASU tells me that BB wants us to call it BB Learn. Really? I'll call it BB Learn if/when it actually functions at ASU and we can use it to teach/learn. Fair?).

Display media file within the page: Well you can choose that item forever, and it doesn't seem to embed video. Not the way it used to work. So, depending on the type of video link you're attempting to post, your options will now be different. I note that YouTube embed code works, but only because the Blackboard site states they optimized for YouTube and a few other commercial sites. Embed code doesn't work for sites we often use at ASU (like Films on Demand), but we'll get to that in a minute.

For YouTube users wanting to embed inside your course, preserving navigation bar (old look):

you still Create Item, but now you click on html button in the toolbar, and post the YouTube-provided source code. (How to find the embed code at a YouTube site shown here: click on embed button under the video at YouTube and copy source code that appears).

At the BB site, you then click on the html button on the Create Item toolbar, and paste your code. You now have an embedded video just the way you'd expect it to look.

Most other sites, because they're not optimized by BB to work, won't work with html embed code, no matter how carefully you write the code. I tried. Give up. Here's the work-around that isn't the same, as the learner does loose the left navigation back to class content, but allows you to keep the learner in the course framework with navigation back to home page for course at the TOP of the page.

To embed video link in your course you use a full frame embed:

Build menu, create external link.

Copy the link, choose CREATE EXTERNAL LINK.

(You can of course do this with YouTube as well, IF you want only top navigation).

Paste your link, Choose "Display media file within the page." (Feature works in this setting).

Remember to choose "Open in New Window"=NO if you want to embed in course window.

Here's a pic of these two choices on the Create External Link object page.

So, things change. Nothing remains the same. Mostly, we don't like change but in the end we adapt. That's what we do. Happy adapting. When things settle down, we'll talk about the worthy new features in BB9.

Blackboard 9, Fall Semester and ASU Tidbits

2010-08-04T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when you least expect it, technology actually works. Too busy to drive to the ASU Tempe campus for the Blackboard Course Administrators Fall 2010 startup meeting, but the technology walked its talk this time by making session available via Adobe Connect. We have this virtual meeting software available as a site license here at ASU for just these multi-campus events, and we hardly ever use it for IT gatherings. It would be like the beautician having nice hair or the plumber having time to fix her own leaky faucet.

But use it we did and had a great session, reviewing the full-scale implementation of BB Learn/9 here, as well as the full-scale release of hosting BB off-site at Blackboard. Fingers crossed, wish us luck.

Here's some information that instructors will find useful as we move forward:
The name: BB Learn/9. It's version 9, the one after 8, but stylish people are calling it Learn to mitigate reality that it's still just a course management system, not a learning environment. A rose is a rose, but feel free to call it an orchid.

BB9looks very different, and some helpful navigation to the new look has been provided by UTO at What's New in BB 9.

For support files once we get past new features and BB9 startup, the official BB 9 Guide site is also online.

Reminder: If you haven’t requested your Fall courses, the ‘Blackboard Course Request’link is at my.asu.edu and right now, courses are being created within hours. This will slow to a day or so at the beginning of the semester, when requests are in the 1,000s.

If you prefer live encounters when seeking help, I’ll be in my office (UCent 413) all day August 19-20, reserving the time for BB support, questions, and sharing ideas. Stop by/call/Skype/Google chat/or Tweet me!

Quick tips on BB9?

The Digital Dropbox is gone. Use ‘create assignment’ for student submissions
There is a new “Edit mode” button on top right that allows you to toggle between instructor/course edit view and student view.
The Control Panel is now a part of the Navigation panel on left, with all the links bundled by topic. Click the Evaluation arrows to find Grade Center. Click the Customization arrows to find tools and change course look.
All the menus are now context-sensitive, available from the pull down chevron next to their names.

Have a great semester!

Change is Painful

2010-08-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

As a new semester approaches, some of my favorite faculty are still making claim that they are so good at teaching, they don't need to use technology. Ironically, some are making this claim on a FaceBook conversation I've been following. FB posts are much too short for me to join in with much hope of changing minds, but I'm weighing in here not on 'technology' but on serving our learners.

Perhaps it is true that F2F, low-tech faculty can be very good at years of practiced lecture, buuuuuttttt....there is so much evidence that today's students aren't like the faculty, aren't oral learners, don't learn enough from being lectured at, and that one would hope that change, despite being painful, could still be possible if we note that they are not us. Today's students are often here because they need to be here. They don't love school, they just want the opportunity to climb into the middle class and increasing evidence (like the recently released Tough Choices, Tough Times) says that we now need higher education to get us there.

Michael Wesch tells a story of asking his lower-division students to raise their hands if they liked their classes. Only a few tentatively did. He then asked how many of them liked to learn. They all raised their hands.

There is only so much institutional support services can do to make it easier for "non-traditional" students (now the majority) to succeed. There has to be some effort made it the classroom but ...what? It's hard? Tenure says you don't have to change? Research time is more important than learning to change? Students are captive, submissive, 'tell me what to do to get out of here' voices with no power to ask for change? What stops faculty from making the effort?

A friend of mine uses analogy of the medical community, saying doctors refused to listen to a call for change. And then the HMOs came in and changed them. If society can come for MDs in the morning, you can bet they'll be at our doors by night.
They're here. In the form of for-profits, government commissions, outraged calls for accountability, budget cuts, and increasing evidence that we're not graduating prepared citizens.

I'm not saying we can't do the job without technology. I am suggesting that we can't do the job without engaging the learners we now have in our courses. By all tools possible. The image above suggests we're not even trying. (NO, just using Blackboard doesn't count. It's a course management system!)

Common wisdom (ok, my therapist) says that 'we don't change until the pain of change becomes less than the pain of staying the same'. I'm thinking we're close to that change point.

If you have ideas on how to get there from here, the Next Generation Learning Challenges Initiative will soon be releasing their RFPs to support projects that reach out to NG students with NG ideas and technologies. No pain, no gain.

3 Before Me!

2010-07-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

"Online Teaching: If it's more work, you're doing it wrong!"

I'm taking this workshop to the streets this month, spreading faculty-contributed best practices far and wee, by any means possible. No better time to shout practice from the digital rooftops. August is upon us and we're all beginning to crank up the dusty LMS shells for Fall semester here at ASU. During busiest course development times, seems it never hurts to remind our teaching community of the obvious. So, let's be obvious for a moment:

It's all, and always, about the learning. We know that. But what is the quality of learning, long term, when the instructor is spread so thin, s/he is cracking into tiny bits? Class sizes are increasing, students are less self-directed, and research demands are omnipresent. Plus, we're increasingly facing 24-hour connectivity and 'online teaching' is now a misnomer. Fact: MOST of the faculty at ASU request a Blackboard container. MOST of the faculty are making more materials and communication options accessible online. Many are teaching hybrid (reduced seat time) courses, and quite a few have leaped into completely online offerings. How you do this makes a difference, and I have at least 10 Best Practices to share, but for now let's dive into my new favorite: 3 Before Me!

What does it mean? It means you stop answering simple questions via email over and over in the mistaken belief that this somehow facilitates better learning. It doesn't. Not really. It encourages laziness and continuation of the misguided notion that you're the only source for knowledge. There are other options, including your own materials, and your BB shell. Email should be reserved for personal, not course, correspondence.

I picked up "3 Before Me" from my colleague, Marc Van Horne, over at ASUOnline, and he's right, for 100 reasons. The most important, from the point of view of faculty support is that technology is a black hole of time and energy and your first line of protection is establishing good practice. 3 Before Me is one of the best of these practices. Protect your energy from small, low ROI, repetitive interrruptions. The second reason is that you're requesting self-reliant behavior from your students and this is a great gift to give.

Try it: set a rule, from the first moment, repeated in many places (syllabus, code of contact, first announcement, whenever rule is broken, etc) that the learner must go to 3, yes THREE, that's III, at least 1-2-3 other sources before coming to you with a digital question. I think this is great rule for F2F teaching as well, modeling responsibility/ownership/self-reliance/ thoughtfulness/ respect for others shouldn't be unique to online behavior...but we won't go there. F2F, instructors love to see that adoring, empty, attention-questing gaze in young eyes and in the classroom, the same, adoring question only gets asked once per class. So, let's just stick to protecting your time and energy digitally, where time and energy matter so easily disappear into an online black hole.

So, what are the magic 3?

The syllabus. 80% of the answers are usually there.
The course discussion board. Create an FAQ forum for quotidian questions. (When is the assignment due, where do I post my response, how many pts for this quiz, how long a post is expected, where do I find the reading...). Other learners often know the answer and may be online earlier and more often than you. This also models a learner community of practice that serves well in the academic discussions and collaborative work.
The technical Help Desk. (At ASU, this is 480-965-4800). You're not the best source of tech support and you shouldn't need to figure out why Janey can't open a PDF while running Window XP and Google Chrome on a Dell Notebook. Leave these questions to people who enjoy answering them.

Here's bottom line: if one student has a question or problem, many others may have the same. Don't answer the same questions over and over, don't create a script for those questions that you open/copy/paste over and over, and don't try to solve questions that aren't your area of expertise (computer problems). Your kindness should not be killing you.

3 Before Me: teaching self-reliance and personal responsibility by sending students in a direction that allows them to look for answers in reliable places, places you've created, places where you've already posted the answers. Give yourself the gift of time and your students the gift of independent inquiry. You'll both be the better for it.

A Brand New Lyterasy?

2010-06-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

A changing world we live in, and those in higher education seem to be running faster and faster while barely keeping up. Seems Cornell is thinking deeply about this new digital literacy realm and digging into making explicit the tricky new definitions and student understanding of academic integrity, internet research, privacy and reputation, and new modes of technology applied to teaching and learning.

Their Digital Literacy Resource site rocks and should be a required site for those thinking about teaching undergraduates anywhere. A great site and a great effort by Cornell at change management, deep thinking, transformational practice.

Blackboard 9 Redux

2010-06-17T15:29:00.001-07:00

It's taking time for the word to get out, but by now most instructors at ASU are discovering that the Drop Box is gone in BB9. Yeay! Hurray! It's about time. We hated the DropBox. It was ugly, clumsy, inelegant and stupid. The Assignment feature is much better, as it automatically integrates with the Grade Center (GC) and allows us to view individual contributions from that student's cell, or to download all submitted contributions for that assignment as a zip file.

More on Assignment feature (creating, using, grading)

Now, everything elegant has a quirk or two, and many are discovering that this is true with the Assignment feature. Namely, that you go to download from the GC and the screen seems to freeze, blow up, or give you an error message. Why, you ask? (After swearing, kicking your PC, or waiting for hours for a response from Help Desk).
Because you broke the old file naming convention rule. Sometimes, one forgets that new Web apps are still a part of the old world of files and commands and naming conventions.

Spaces. Periods. Funky symbols. Hash marks. Don't do that. So what if you forget that age-old rule? Rename the assignment. DO NOT rename the column in the Grade Center, rename the assignment itself. The problem should go away.

So, a bite-size recap of golden rules for happy computing with BB:
#1. If something seems broken, try another browser.
#2. If that doesn't fix it, remember to only use computer-friendly naming conventions for files, or for objects that will turn into files.

Enjoyable eLearning

2010-05-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

Is "enjoyable eLearning" an oxymoron? I don't think so, or I wouldn't do what I do. It saved me, and brought me back to the education table long after I'd hardened my heart and thrown up my hands in despair. Now, I do what I can to send out the word to other knowledge-hungry souls that there IS an alternative to butt-in-seat/bored to tears. The question on all the minds of my CoP, though, is what does really good eLearning look like? How do we know?
Take a look.
This short, Pecha Kucha format piece by Clive Shephard (one of my favorite thinkers on the topic) pulls together some good research and great ideas to answer the question. Need a hook to lure you in to Clive's presentation? Here's a summary of why he thinks eLearning is seldom enjoyable, and how we could it make it more so.
why eLearning is seldom enjoyable:
policy constraints, design faults, problems in the blend (not enough social), isn't for everyone, sometimes learning hurts
Now, how we can make (e)learning more enjoyable:
challenge conventions, tell interesting stories, provide engaging challenges, don't overdo the self-study, express yourself!
But don't stop there. Watch Clive's Pecha Kucha and decide for yourself.

What was I writing about, again?

2010-04-28T15:49:00.000-07:00

Anyone thinking about emerging technologies recognizes the "blessing and the curse" being brought about by the overabundance of "anytime, all the time" information falling down on our heads. We love it and it wears us out as we learn to be a different type of person, learner, chooser, reader, scanner, thinker.

This month, a very thoughtful article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly takes a deep look at some of the research and implications of the fire hose nature of information flow, especially as it affects teaching in a higher education setting. The day of "turn off your laptops" as solution is so very behind us, but it doesn't seem that very much of HE is even thinking about how to change, adapt, do our job differently.

For those of us willing to enter that murky water, do read Gordon and Bogen's (2009) interesting and challenging expedition into deep seas.

Gordon, E., & Boden, D. (Spring 2009). Designing choreographies for the new economy of attention. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(2), 1-8.

TechBytes Recap: Multimedia

2010-02-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

Every two weeks, my colleagues gather informally in a small room over cookies and chocolate to talk for 20+ minutes on technology-enhanced teaching and learning. It's called TechBytes and it's come on-come all-come just a few in very busy and stressful schedules. Thus the 20-minute framework and the cookies.

Last week, we talked about more effective use of media in covering subject matter. A story tells the story better than a lecture. The challenge is to find material and here's a few great places to start:

For open material, visit Jane Hart's post of 25 free instructional video sites. As always, Jane researches, inquires, gathers and delivers some excellent links for instructional and educational videos.
Tony Hirst put together a "How Do I...?" search engine of instructional video sites that brings it all under one umbrella if you're looking for these.
For ASU affiliates, the Library pays for access to excellent resources in multimedia. My favorite is Films on Demand (aka FMG, from the Films Media Group), which include feature-length documentaries and academic videos. These resources are often impossible to find at the Library site, so start at the subject librarian's ASU streaming video guide page.

We also talked briefly about the UCLA vs. AIME lawyers' attack on HE Fair Use practices, but that's a messy can of worms for a short recap on fair and easy use of media. For those wishing to dig deep, I can't more highly recommend the work of my favorite fighter for the common good and 'copyleftist' Lawrence Lessig:

"In real libraries, in real space, access is not metered at the level of the page (or the image on the page). ... You get to browse through the whole of the library, for free. You get to check out the books you want to read, for free. The real-space library is a den protected from the metering of the market. It is of course created within a market; but like kids in a playroom, we let the life inside the library ignore the market outside. This freedom gave us something real. It gave us the freedom to research, regardless of our wealth; the freedom to read, widely and technically, beyond our means. It was a way to assure that all of our culture was available and reachable -- not just that part that happens to be profitable to stock. It is a guarantee that we have the opportunity to learn about our past, even if we lack the will to do so."
Lawrence Lessig (2010). "For the Love of Culture: Google, Copyright, and Our Future." The New Republic, January 26.

The same is true of schools and thus the "Fair Use" section (107) of US copyright law. Just because the world is rapidly changing from flat text to many media options, from paper to digital, from doc to mp3 & mp4, from the classroom to the world room, doesn't mean Fair Use changes for vendors based on form of media or place of the classroom, nor that our access to knowledge should be newly limited or available only to the wealthiest among us. Just the opposite should be true, and if there were anything higher education should be willing to fight for, it is the inalienable rights of everyone to have access to the content that shapes our ideas, our lives, our limits.

ELI: When you can't be there...

2010-01-21T08:40:00.000-08:00

Wasn't that an old Hallmark slogan? Well, it's much better suited to the value of streaming media and I made much use of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's live and archival streaming of their keynote and featured sessions this week.

ELI 2010 Sessions

I don't always agree with the "technology at all costs" agenda of ELI, seen in the choice of topics and speakers (proud self-titled Edupunks, geeks & dweebs) at the meeting, but if you're curious about the leading edge of technology-infused educational practices, these are the sessions to watch.

While you're at it, check out some of my favorite thought leaders -- including the passionate teacher Gardner Campbell, innovation king Cole Camplese and assessment superman Chuck Dzubian. You'll also find a very fun overview of leading trends in the "lightning round" of commentary/presentation regarding the latest Horizon Report on emerging trends.

If watching tiny people talk isn't your thing, do be sure to check out the Horizon Report 2010.

It's always released at the annual ELI meeting, and always an exciting, collaborative understanding of what's happening (and will be happening up ahead) for higher education. I've always loved the thoughtful, research-based and transparent way that the New Media Consortium (NMC) chooses and uses an advisory board to select and describe "emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, orcreative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years."

Why I think they're the best research out there on technology use and futures in HE: their board is more than 40% international; they use a Delphi Process to select the trends, and the board drafts the report via a wiki. It's the "we smarter than me" that I write about so often now. Would that we could incorporate their processes into our courses as the teachable moment.

Speaking of transparency: It's true I have reason to be biased and love NMC. They let me host my "Shared Knowledge" Wiki project at their site. Recognizing the value of my dissertation research in collaborative, shared, and distributive knowledge makes me deeply

Enjoy!

Testing, Assessment, and Mastery Learning

2009-12-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

Fair Juliet claimed that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but Juliet never had to assess learning and certainly could never have imagined the tools we now have to do so. Most of which we just don't use much or in very inventive ways.

Use of technology that allows a learner to take more ownership of learning, subject mastery and self-evaluation has helped in understanding more applied formative assessment practices. A few that we tossed about in the latest College of Public Programs TechByte lunch topic on assessment were the rich, often hidden features within Blackboard tests/quizzes.

Here's bottom line. We want learners to learn. Do we really care that it took them more time/effort than another learner, or that they didn't understand a concept first time around? Why not use testing as a way for them to explore meaning, work through issues they don't understand, concentrate harder on the material they didn't master, and give them a tool and an option to rethink / redo / revise? Isn't that how learning happens best?

Here's a few practices shared in putting our heads together. Add any you've come up with and perhaps our students will actually value, instead of dread, our assessment practices.

Blackboard (at ASU; other places, other CMS...same principles):

Set test for multiple attempts. You can choose number of attempts (unlimited, 3, etc) and time frame (Monday from 9am-noon, 50 minutes per attempt) , but why are we asking that they get it right first time? What if it's the way you phrased question that stumped them? Where's the harm in going back to the book, rethinking, trying again, going back to the source? It may be the only time they do!
Randomize questions for each redo, forcing students to concentrate on questions each time, not just fill in madly to get to the missed questions. (also hinders sharing)
Put questions in a pool, allowing students to pull different questions each attempt (see bullet above on sharing). This is also a great way to offer a final, randomly pulling questions from previous quizzes.
Set exam for storing best attempt, not last attempt. Research shows that students are more likely to try again if not afraid of inability to top last score. (BB instructors: this feature is oddly hidden in Grade Center/Modify Column, rather than via deployment - which is why so few of us use it and leave last attempt as default)
Give feedback immediately for each of the missed questions. Don't provide answer, but perhaps the page in text where concept is found or the reason they may have missed question, etc. One instructor (Hey, Kelly!) tells us that she has been consistently receiving grateful feedback from learners as she improves feedback on missed (and correct!) responses in her quizzes.

Tom D'Angelo and Patricia Cross suggest that unless feedback is very immediate or absolutely needed to progress (eg "follow my advice on your rewrite of this paper, or else"), students don't review or follow up on feedback. Giving them auto-feedback, in a low-risk environment where they know you don't see their first effort, is a great use of technology to invite time-on-task and mastery learning.

Other ideas for more formative self-assessment practices using the CMS testing options? Send them my way and I'll incorporate.

Best Practices in Online Teaching, Part II

2009-12-03T15:24:00.000-08:00

Long ago and faraway, I wrote a post about the workshop I do on e-Teaching. The point of the workshop is to remind all of us, again and again, that technology can be a time-sucking black hole and that online instructors often burn out by not setting boundaries or using known "best practices" in e-Teaching. I listed a few easy things you can do to create very engaging learning experiences while still protecting your time and sanity. I promised that I'd collect more ideas from the workshop offerings and post them and like so many good and well-meant plans, they got sucked into the time-sucking black hole of technology, e-learning and life.

So, meeting with the community that calls itself "instructional designers of ASU" and talking about these ideas & asking for more/their favorite/new e-teaching practices that save instructor sanity brought a few reminders and new tools to my kit. Here, many months later, are Tips, Part II:

Use an FAQ. Gather your questions, especially the technical or how-to kind, into an FAQ. You never know when/where/why students will mysteriously forget how to do the simplest things and if they don't find the answer where they're looking, they'll send email (forbidden, as you know if you read Part I) or ask in the discussion board. Teach them to look before asking by putting general questions in one helpful FAQ location.

Don't use dates in your content. Don't put hard dates in any of your material. If you work with good designers, you'll know they repeat this till they're blue in the face, and there's a reason. You'll just have to rip them out when you offer the course again, and dates are hard to find. Label your modules "Week X" or "Module X: The Role of Z in Y" or whatever you like, but NOT "Week X: April 3-10". Instead, post a course calendar or schedule in a prominent place. Post current week/module/topic in the announcements. Send them email. Just don't build dates in your content material.

Plan Ahead. Duh! And still we don't because life happens. But unlike the F2F mode, you can't scramble online. Mistakes are made and you can't see the puzzled faces at the end of the "series of tubes" that deliver your course. It's twice as much work if you scramble to pull together material and assignments and outcomes and assessments online. Like the novice carpenter that measures once, cuts twice and wastes a lot of wood, many of us learn the hard way that the best online material is the kind that's fully developed on the first day of class.

Summarize & summarize again. Yes, something is lost when learners can't see your face or gestures. Mastery of the medium means we use technology to create other ways of enforcing meaning. An excellent suggestion at the ID meeting came from an instructor's practice of "Summary Monday and Surprise Thursday" posts. Every Monday morning, the instructor recapped in a post all the questions/comments/ideas that had come up that deepened understanding. On Thursday, she posted summaries of little problems, glitches, misunderstandings, etc that she had encountered or heard about. It is a great way of creating community, deepening understanding, encouraging more time on task, and sharing solutions to problems that might occur again.
Highlight the process. One designer claimed that the most problems disappear if you send the student back to the instructions, which they didn't read. Most likely true, but turning the lens back on ourselves, perhaps the message is don't embed important instructions in line after line of dense text. Use "microposts" for important info and dates. Try providing text and an audio file. Consider using the free software Jing to record a short animation capturing onscreen action when you're asking them to do a computer-related task (like submitting an assignment or searching library resources). Maybe the learner is making mistakes because we're making it so easy for them to get lost.

One designer talked about a course that uses Adaptive Release to motivate learners to stay up to speed. It was a great example of new approaches to teaching-as-coaching, but that's a whole new Blog post. Meanwhile, if you have a favorite teaching/tech practice, please share!
Happy trails, happy tech innovation, happy teaching.

Blackboard 8 and IE8 - another strained relationship

2009-09-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

When our lives intertwine and in the first rush of emotion, we promise to love each other forever. Then one or both of us changes. We can't help it.
It just happens.

And in that change, things go amiss, nothing is the same and it just doesn't work anymore. Broken compatibility. It just happens.

It happened with the the two 8s recently. Blackboard 8 and IE8. Reports are numerous of odd problems, large and small, when using IE8 with ASU's latest BB version. Until a new version of BB is released, ASU can only recommend that instructors and students USE A DIFFERENT BROWSER with ASU's version of Blackboard. The UTO promises to send out a message when an update is available that solves the problems reported. These problems include:

Small: A security warning that sometimes appears when logging into BB, asking whether you want to "view only the web page content that was delivered securely?" This question sometimes is also asked when instructors enter the Grade Center. Students and instructors should say yes, or log out and use another browser.
Large: Timer blocks submit button in an exam, making it impossible for students to submit exams. IE8 seems so buggy that it's been released with a "compatibility viewer button", allowing you to choose Web sites you know don't work in IE8, enter their address, then switch to IE7 compatibility mode. Students must know to do this BEFORE entering the exam or use another browser.
Large: Students get false message "Please enter valid file" when attempting to upload a valid file in the assignment feature. Again, IE7 compatibility mode will work, or use another browser.

From an ease of use point of view, despite your desire to make a previously lovely relationship work, the best advice is to always use a different browser with BB8 at ASU until we hear that an update has been received and installed on the BB server.

Especially if you're a student entering a "one time only" exam at ASU!

Students using computers at ASU campus sites have the option of using Firefox. The students should click “Start” on the lower left corner of the screen, then click on the link to “Firefox” to use this browser. Students using computers off-campus may download a free version of Firefox at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ie.html

In online work, Blackboard, library or just visiting Web sites, "Use another browser" often solves 80% of your troubles.

IF the easy way isn't someone's style, or they only have IE8 and can't install another browser, here's ASU's advice on setting up IE8 Compatibility Viewer for ASU.

Reminder: If you're taking an exam, this must be done BEFORE entering the exam as your page refreshes and you're tossed out. IT'S TOO LATE if you're already there; you should have... used a different browser.

ASU Library toolbar rocks

2009-09-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

ASU affiliates: If you haven't heard about it yet, download the toolbar that the Library has released for Firefox, IE and Safari. I'm hoping they'll keep going and release for Chrome, but right now I'll just rest in gratitude for great work done. You can download and install in seconds and it provides quick, configured access to their most popular and useful resources.

So lovely. So helpful for the digital scholar. The benefit isn't simply in having important resources like Google Scholar, the catalog and your account at your fingertips, it's that you're authenticated through the Library when you access the materials.

Here's a brief demo on the tool and why it can change how, and how quickly, you find the resources you need when you need them.

Happy scholarly journeys and W00t to the ASU Library.

Digital Me: Writing tools, sites, services

2009-07-31T16:30:00.000-07:00

An ASU-Centric Guide to Web-based tools for student writing and scholarship.
Major Resources Referenced on this Page:

Sometimes, it's about the Tool

One aspect of technology where higher education has worked collaboratively and created a strong community of practice is in the area of student writing.

Software, sites and shared ideas are available to all student seeking to improve their writing and to the instructor that is looking for materials to help with specific aspects of student work.

Beginning locally, the ASU Library has a site with resources for online students. Their tutorials section has an extensive set of short, easy to understand guides into beginning a research paper or project.

Starting earlier in the process, the Purdue Online Writing Lab offers an open set of resources for instructors and students. Instructors wishing to help a student with a particular problem (outlines, brainstorming, the meaning of a paragraph, grammar, academic writing, APA...) will find help, language and examples on the OWL site.

An important part of scholarly work is being able to synthesize readings and research, and instructors can incorporate the use of RefWorks by reviewing a student's annotated citations before allowing them to begin writing. You will find the RefShare Web function of RefWorks an excellent way of sharing resources. Colleen has a public example online, and Yale Medical School has a nice tutorial on uses of RefShare.

Techniques in online pedagogy

For faculty teaching online or in reduced seat time (hybrid) formats, a number of best practices can be considered in creating a learner-supportive environment:

1. Set clear standards and expectation.

A rubric sets objective standards that allow the learner to critique their work before submission. Rubistar provides free tools and support for creating effective rubrics, as well as providing a site for sharing by assignment category. Here's one for a persuasive essay.

Provide an overview set of resources on scholarly writing, plagiarism, and standards for the discipline before assigning writing projects. Students often don't associate certain writing practices with "plagiarism". Rutgers University has an excellent, informal, light-hearted review of plagiarism and what it means to be an intellectually honest college student.

2. Consider making writing more public via posting writing assignments in the Blackboard discussion board so that students can see other posts, comments, critiques.

3. Posting work in a public Blog e-portfolio also assists in helping the student to take more ownership of the work and in having them see themselves as public writers.

4. Provide a framework for student critique and revision. GoogleDocs at MyASU might be a great tool for both collaborative writing and peer review assignments.

5. Be very specific in addressing the student's weakest writing point. OWL is a very good site for breaking these down and offering aids to improve that issue.

One simple practice

If you're still using the Blackboard Drop Box, stop! Create a BB assignment. It allows you to assign comments in the gradebook, where students focus much more of their attention than red markings on a paper. Tom Angelo (Classroom Assessment Techniques) often reminds us that red marks on paper aren't as effective as summarizing improvement needs. All your hard work can be lost if you don't reach the student where they are.

Not every student can be a great writer, but every student can be taught to be a better, clearer, more scholarly writer.

Revisiting Respondus

2009-07-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

Many faculty at ASU don't know that long before ASU purchased the Respondus LockDown Browser, we site licensed the rest of the Respondus suite to make faculty lives easier.

On request, instructors are provided with these easy-to-use quiz creation and learner flash-card/memorization authoring tools. The major (and most time-saving rather than draining) component of the software is a PC-only piece of software that allows the instructor to quickly type up exam questions (albeit in a stylized, Respondus format) and upload to Blackboard. If you're a Mac user, type up the questions and install Respondus/load into your BB course shell from a department PC on campus.

If as an instructor, you make use of Blackboard exams, Respondus saves you the tedious, time-consuming, dull BB process of creating exam, typing each question and answer in a little box, setting points, clicking next and waiting, etc. Yes, it takes a bit of time to download and configure the Respondus software, recognize the BB server and find your course, but do it once, and then you're good to go for all your courses. It helps to keep a cheat sheet of Respondus question formats nearby, as the format is strict, documentation hard to find and it's easy to forget an asterik or parenthesis where needed. If you're willing to learn the process, then creating a Blackboard exam can truly take just minutes.

Here are a few links to help you with the learning curve:

Requesting the software from ASU site license store. (You'll receive an email that ASU has given you access to the Blackboard community shell where the install and tutorials are kept). Once you receive, login to Blackboard, find the org shell, download Respondus and install.
Example formats for each type Blackboard quiz questions - (begins on p. 9 of user guide)
ASU's Respondus Help site
One-time configuration of our Blackboard server to recognize and upload Respondus files

Now wasn't that easy?

ASU changes BB course request process (again)

2009-07-17T16:36:00.000-07:00

When returning for Fall semester, ASU instructors will be surprised to find that the process for creating/copying BB course shells has changed without any notice going out to them. Again. The positive piece of the news is that for courses with existing SLNs, the system now pulls in the details and we no longer have to know #, title, SLN on hand to request a course.

New process for instructors requesting BB course shells:

Log in to my.asu.edu, and click on “My Info” tab at top if not already taken there. At the top right, you’ll see “My Classes” with all their courses listed by semester. If the BB image on right for a course has a “+” sign, there is currently no course shell for this section and it can be requested by clicking on the BB icon. The yellow icon now takes instructor to Class tools (roster, submitting grades, academic status report).

IF the course doesn’t yet have an SLN, and instructor wants to begin work developing the BB material, click on Course Request farther down in Faculty Tools and put in a working title for a DEVELOPMENT shell that can then be copied to an SLN course at any time.

Clear as mud? I'm here most of summer if you need help.

click on image to display larger view

PollEverywhere, Poll Everyone!

2009-07-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

PollEverywhere did it!

Every once in awhile, affordance of a technology reaches across the Web and grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me till my teeth rattle. I don't have to think deeply about how to use it or how to convince instructors to struggle with changing their teaching practices to use it in meaningful ways (Blogs, Wikis, RSS, RefWorks, shared docs, etc).

Every once in awhile (and oh I love those awhiles), there's a tool that can instantly be adopted across the disciplines to make learning more active, engaged and participatory. Student response systems (clickers) were all that, and I lobbied long and hard ~5 years ago for budget to purchase enough TurningPoint clickers for ASU West to outfit the auditorium. The mobile service my cracker-jack sharp team created was popular with a number of instructors, but never caught on the way I thought it would because of the difficulty for instructors in:

learning the software to pre-incorporate questions into PowerPoint
installing in the desired classroom
ordering equipment
passing out the clickers
working around hardware problems (line of sight, battery, etc)

Too much wasted time. Too hard to work around the glitches. Lots of effort simply to give learners a voice in polling, checking understandings, determining results. Mostly I failed in my convincing arguments and the mobile cart of clickers sat in the supply room.

I tried writing a Web application that instructors could copy and use in the computer classrooms to do their own polls on the fly, but it was kludgey and little utilized. I KNEW the research showed better engagement and attention when learners were involved in thinking, deciding, choosing, responding and that instructors paced and re-evaluated lessons based on awareness of student understanding. What to do about that?
PollEverywhere did it!

Recognizing that people in an audience generally have access to SMS, or Twitter or the Web...they built a Web-based audience response system that takes input from all three. Plus, they made it time-and-idiot proof for me to put up a poll in moments via their Web interface. Each response has a number (clearly displayed) that the audience chooses if they want to vote for that option. And PollEverywhere even keeps track of machine/browser, politely telling your students that they already voted on a particular question.

From my poll authoring account, I can instantly display all incoming results via the Web site, or close the poll and download results to a slide. (Don't forget to upgrade to the slightly more generous, higher education account for this option).

It couldn't be easier and here's more info on that. I can use it online and in F2F classes. Advice: if there are students in the F2F class that don't have an SMS-ready phone, Twitter feed or their laptop with them, tell your students to work in teams. Ask everyone who does have access to raise their hand. Start there and in no time, you may find more students bringing their laptops to class. And that's a good thing! Feel free to ask me why.

The bid disadvantage: free accounts only allow 32 responses per question. Your students will have to work in teams. This isn't a bad idea as you may find students in your F2F class that still don't have an SMS-ready phone, Twitter feed or their laptop with them. Ask everyone who does have access to raise their hand. Start there, form <32 groups and collaborate.

If I had a bucket of wishes, one would be that ASU purchases the site license for PollEverywhere and makes polling possible for all instructors, for classes of all sizes. We'd be able to tie responses to student ID, take attendance automatically, use as team reporting tool. Plus, we don't need to be passing the cost of expensive clickers on to students at a time of spiraling tuition and textbook costs. We do need access to meaningful learning technologies embedded in the fabric of the university. So that's what I'd wish for if I had a bucket of wishes.
Failing that wish, I'd wish that PollEverywhere had kinder pricing for teachers going it on their own. Right now, education budgets won't support this pricing, and no HE instructor is going to reach into their pocket for $700/year to replace student-purchased clickers. We're stuck with free, limited seat option for now.

My poll on ASU's efforts in digital literacy, results and info on voting via Web, Twitter or SMS are all available here.

Top Ten Learning Tools

2009-05-06T13:24:00.001-07:00

There's a wonderful researcher working in the UK by the name of Jane Hart who compiles a number of Top Ten lists on everyone's favorite learning tools. With so many new and amazing ways to find and share knowledge out there today, narrowing to 10 is a tough task, but I'm taking it on just to spread word on my favorites and link you to the consensus page that Jane hosts.

Colleen's Top Ten Learning Tools for 2009

Google Search - Who can live without? (If you need peer-review, use Google Scholar)

Wikepedia - What do you need to know? The world may have an answer

Jing - easy screen and action capture

Flip Video - sometimes, it's about the hardware.

GoogleDocs - collaboration across time, space, applications

Blogger.com - Learning through reflection and inviting comment

Ning - creating quick communty sites for social learning

Twitter - and related apps (tweetchat.com, search.twitter.com) for all things micro-bloggable

SlideShare - takes the tech glitches out of presenting and stores for anytime retrieval

IBM's Many Eyes - Visualizing data in new and intuitive ways

If you haven't explored any of these tools yet, take some time. I've used them all in my teaching, learning to find, share, make sense of or collaborate in the knowledge realm. And some are just plain fun to use. If you have others, favorites, can't live withouts...send them on to Jane or me.

Best Practices in Online Teaching

2009-04-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

I'm doing a workshop at the Teaching and Learning with Technology 2009 Conference, hosted by the Maricopa Community Colleges, and thought I'd beta-test some ideas on my own community here in the College of Public Programs at ASU. First, because some of the faculty here have been experimenting with better teaching online for years, and second, because this is a great conference that the Center for Learning and Instruction at MCC does each year, and I want ASU to look good when I present.

My topic will be "e-Teaching: if it's more work, you're doing it wrong" - a topic very dear to my heart and one that I promote to the faculty until they're tired of hearing from me. But it's common knowledge and much discusses in the online research that instructors struggle managing workload when first teaching online. And if they don't seek help, they often burn out and tell others not to attempt it. It doesn't have to be that way, and there's much in the literature regarding practices that make it easier for the instructor and the learner to experience online courses. I'd go so far as to say that if you're doing it right, you can leverage the technology to make less work for you, once the course is developed.

Quick tips of the Top Ten sort:

NO email. At least not on the course content, assignments, schedule, etc. That's what the discussion forum is for and rather than answer the same question 10 times, you answer it once.
Simple, clear navigation and course structure. If you don't know how to turn off some of the navigation menu in your course management system, ask someone. Students hate 10 links, and they hate them more when half of them are blank. Mine are: Announcements, Course Information, Learning Modules, Communication, Discussion Board, Tools. Students find what they need quickly and in the places expected. I also link to other places in the course when inside the learning modules (eg discussion board for a post, Course Info/Syllabus when referring to policies, etc)
Frequent communication. Lure them to class! Send an email when you've opened a new module, released a quiz, posted grades, posted an announcement, etc. The more time 'in class', the better they'll do and letting them know something new is waiting often lures them in.
Clear expectations. It is harder online and the written text might be interpreted in different ways. What you mean by "a rich discussion post" might be 2 sentences to a student. Let them know exactly what's expected and consequences for not delivering. Rubrics are great for setting explicit values to grading. Pts, # words/paragraphs/citations/, language, spelling, etc all help. Hate creating rubrics? Try the Rubistar site where instructors share work. Sadly, they don't organize by grades, so you need to be specific in searching. Here's one for a research argument essay.
Instructor presence. Your students need to feel a connection to you. Announcements help, but audio announcements, pictures, personal stories all create a better 'virtual you'. A colleague of mine publishes a picture a week with his announcements. During my fellowship, travelling around the US, I put up pics of where I was each each week.

OK, those are my top 5. Sound right? Send more and I'll add a Part II.

Words, Tags, Bones and Trees: the Value of Clouds

2009-04-04T08:18:00.000-07:00

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
It's cloud illusions I recall,
I really don't know clouds, at all.

Another post on data in the clouds? No, not today. Instead, a presentation about extending word clouds as trees got me thinking about the value of presenting data in the shape of clouds. Clouds and trees and ...fishbone diagrams. For those new to word clouds, it's time to hop into a new tool for visualizing text and the amazing possibilities it affords for better understanding and text mining. In that vein, I enjoyed a presentation (linked below) by Gambette and Veronis, not because they offer some very complicated home-grown software for generating a version of tag clouds via tree structures, but because they explain the value for use of analyzing text via cloud structures.

In teaching, use of simple tag/word cloud tools like Wordle or IBM's Many Eyes provide a tool for visualizing the student's own or another author's text. For visual learners, this provides valuable insight and synthesis of ideas that may otherwise prove elusive. As the presentation below describes, tag clouds provide tools for objective literature analysis, discourse analysis, text mining for meaning, or an exploration of natural language processing - which the authors describe as text desambiguation. Much more complicated than necessary, when a picture speaks 1,000 words, but first one needs access to the picture.

So explore Wordle first with a favorite piece of your text (as I did with this Blog post on right; click on thumbnail to access). It's as simple as copy and paste in the Wordle window. See if it doesn't provide immediate insight into the text and a new option for exploring meaning. Then, wander over to ManyEyes and explore the many, many visual and structural options for doing the same. Both are free to use. If you have ideas for using in your teaching, post them here and I'll share in my work. For a more detailed and scholarly look at the use of cloud analysis, follow along in the Slideshare presentation: Visualising a text with a tree cloud

When Recession Meets the Cloud

2009-03-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

I often do workshops and presentations on Web 2 and social media, but you'll now hear a new hesitation in the current topics I cover. In the past (a few brief months ago), I passionately demonstrated and encouraged the shift from desktop work to the amazing collaborative possibilities in shared knowledge creation via the cloud. Wikis, Blogs, RSS, Google Apps, flickr, furl...endless tools for combinatory work in creating emergent and consensus-based information. A new digital world, literacy, connectivism.

I don't change my philosophies lightly, but in a workshop this weekend for the Phoenix Think Tank, I proposed caution. Working in the cloud means your data exists out there, and it doesn't take a mind like Ray Kurzweil's to know that some of the companies providing free tools we're accessing will go bust up ahead. Never is it more important to have a backup of your data. And backups of data originally entered in the cloud aren't easy to access, shape, manage or recreate for meaning.

Free wasn't a sustainable business model. Great software, free accounts, almost unlimited storage. What happens to our collaborative mind maps if MindMeister folds? To our common galleries, and personal collections, if flickr falls? To our shared documents, calendars, spreadsheets if Google takes down the free versions of GoogleApps? What, lose Google stuff?? Yes, dear reader, even Google users, knowing that the G-kids are richer than God, aren't immune. I lost all my avatar work when Google abandoned Lively, and now that they're shutting down GooglePages, I'm expecting the same to happen to the Web site I have there. Even the wealthiest vendors may become tired of providing a free lunch in troubled times. And the ones hanging on by a thread will no longer be able to sustain the investment.

So I'll continue to promote the tools I demontrated for the Think Tank:

We exploredsome of my favorites here.
And looked at a community-created Wiki of tools for e-learning and professional development here.
We also talked about value of LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Twitter (lots of Twitter, see earlier posts on variety of Twitter-related tools) for building community.

A rich discussion related to the "we smarter than me" wisdom of crowds philosophy ensued, and included the rise of Wikipedia, and concerns regarding the definition of expert, smart and literate in the digital, just-in-time everything age.

Great group. Great discussion. Still lots of enthusiasm regarding social media, but business-minded people know that we're in a new dot.com (and every other kind of com) bust and it may not be wise to depend on these tools being here tomorrow. There's no such thing as a free lunch OR free software. You pay somehow. In the past, with Web 2, the publicity and advertising worked for vendors. Don't expect it to work for all of them in the months ahead.

My guess is that most of the survivors will succeed through a tiered system of features and services. SurveyMonkey provides great entry tools for free, but if you need to download and do deeper analysis on your data, you pay for a deeper license. In the future, I'm guessing many vendors will find current services unsustainable.

If your software has value to the user, it has a chance. Otherwise, we'll give up the toys that clutter our bookmarks. We'll choose more cautiously:

individuals will pay for features they need,
companies will pay for ROI-driven tools that are backed by security, privacy and firewalls (see Google's commercial offering of GoogleApps), and
those of us who love techno-bling will pay for the next affordable killer app that lures us in and makes us realize we just can't do without it. (Take a look at IntroNetwork's social networking software for a new candidate in this category!)

That's what I talked about at the last presentation. But I'm known to change my mind. And as Dennis Miller used to say after his infamous rants, "I could be wrong."

Twitter, Part 2

2009-03-26T17:40:00.001-07:00

A few more thoughts on the not instantly apparent value of our favorite love/hate tool. Trick is, to find the value, you need to leave the site and use other tools.
Here's my favorite: Tweechat.com

Login with your Twitter account there and join your friends, colleagues, team, etc in a real-time, spontaneous chatroom where all tweets are auto-hashed, as well as created and displayed in that tweetchat window. YOUR tweets are auto-posted to your personal stream. I could have actually done without the latter as a group conversation on Twitter can become quite raucous and my running Tweet quick bits don't need to be streamed to my followers. (That sounds so cute, my followers!)

Still, Tweetchat is a fast, effective, easy to dynamically access a chat room and preserve the chat. All you need is to choose a name and everyone is in. The room name becomes the hash tag in Twitter.

So, speaking of hash tags: let's dig in there too. If you want to 'collect' all tweets on a topic when not in a tweetchat, put a # in front of that term and then, we search for that hash tag at search.twitter.com

By customizing a key term using the hash tag, a group can create a common flow and gather all the tweets on a topic. Now yes, search.twitter.com will search on any word, not just hash tags but the value of the hash is being able to label and gather a certain set of posts. Example: hash tags have been used effectively at conferences, where attendees can find, follow, connect to other attendees' posts. Search for "#sxsw09" and check out all the fun tweets that came out of the Austin festival recently.

Twitter as chat room with archive.

Twitter as ...collective sharing of tweets around an event or issue or ...whatever you collectively decide to hash.

New tools mean new uses. These are a couple of little child tools hanging off the mother tool, Twitter. If you know more, or know more uses for Twitter and Twitter children, let us know!

Happy Birthday, Twitter!

2009-03-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

I'll be the first to admit that I struggled with Twitter. I am a person that picks picks picks apart a technology until I feel that I understand, if not it's buttons and icons and features and hidden tools, then at least - at the very least - it's purpose. What is affordance? How will it help us learn, think, connect, serve, become, undertand, share, create, facilitate? What does it DO?

Twitter was released three years ago today as a 140 character (or less) micro-blogging site. At least that's what others said. Twitter simply said "Tell us what you're doing right now." So, people shared Zen-like bits of minutia. This threw off my hunt for meaning. Micro-blogging would be sharing your ideas, positions, passions in 140 characters or less. It's not having your readers stroll through endless posts on what you're watching, eating, seeing out the window. And yet, that's how people were using Twitter. Because Twitter asked "What are you doing?"

Now, people stay in touch - with friends, colleagues, heroes, wonderful characters, minor celebrities - at the most intimate of details regarding what they eat and do. In 140 characters or less. Maybe it creates community in the old, lost neighborhood sense regarding knowing people on the level of the mundane.

Still, the people who claimed it was a micro-blogging venue are correct, too. Depending who you follow, you find rich posts, deep linking, breaking news. If you're one of the 'need to be plugged in' addicts, Twitter is a killer app. News by the second. Follow enough newsy tweets and your head spins faster than watching CNN ticker feeds while eating and reading the newspaper.

So I still don't know what Twitter's singular affordance might be, but using it to create streaming information across a 'mutual following' community is a great way to gather and share the fleeting, even though atemporal, moment. I think we may find multiple shared thought uses, for academic courses and community, if we think deeply over time. Meanwhile, let me know if you need ideas on how you might use Twitter to reach students, prospective studens, faculty ...or worse. (I'm thinking hashtags and search.twitter.com ?)

Happy birthday, Twitter. Wish I could invite all my lovely Twitter friends to your virtual birthday party!

Blackboard and Assessment Redux

2009-03-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

I'm guessing that readers interested in more diverse topics than Blackboard testing options will begin to wonder why I fixate on this topic when so very much is to be explored in the new, digital landscape of e-learning. I often wonder the same, but I go where the questions gather. ASU recently implemented the Respondus LockDown Browser for Blackboard and questions are pouring into my mail and phone. Informal summary on usage: "Huh?"

RLB is not intuitive. It's a pain for instructors, first as they figure it out on their side, and then explaining RLB to their students. Plus, no one in the UTO is supporting instruction anymore AND the software is based on fear and distrust of cheating/ sharing/ copying. This is never a good starting point for a conversation with our digital natives. Thanks to Google and Apple, learners expect the technology to work and they believe the Internet is the left (and more reliable) side of their brain. They do not understand, like, or agree with ASU use of RLB. But RLB is a good tool in the right usage. Remind students that it's not about them, but the other guy. (The cheater who hands out answers at the frat party and throws off the curve). Thus, a bit of a difficulty with startup and understanding affordance shouldn't stop us from using it. Let's all simmer down and give it a try. So this post, hopefully the last one on BB tools for awhile, is a quick "RLB made easy."

Here's the skinny on the instructor side:

It must be enabled for the course first. (Control Panel/Manage tools/Building Block tool Availability/check RLB)
It must also be enabled for each deployed exam (Control Panel/Respondus LockDown Browser under the Course Tools menu)

Then, for the poor, suffering student, each must be able to:

Find the ASU site that has the LDB installer for our BB
Install on computer (Windows and Mac10.3.9 only)
Exit all Internet applications
Run RLB, login to BB, take the test, close out RLB

A lot of technical potholes to ensure academic integrity, but there it is. Here's the official, but difficult to find, word from ASU's University Technology Office.

Tinkering, Teaching, Mentoring

2009-03-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

Those who know me can easily trace my understanding of learning and meaningful knowledge creation to the works of John Seely Brown. Knowing as being, knowing as doing, and learning as the act of becoming expert in that space where your interest and passion resides.

JSB taught me, from a distance and after a lifetime of my own face-forward education, about the social and public nature of learning and about the value of creativity, innovation and criticism/critique in learning from others and with others. I won't even start on his influence on my dissertation related to shared and distributed knowledge. We stand on the shoulders of giants. What I love most about JSB is that he's one of the USA's most innovative technology creators (previously Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center), and his focus is never about the technology. My kind of expert! Here's his latest exploration. An interesting thought piece on the value of tinkering and the public and community approach to learning and doing and being and becoming for the next generation of knowledge leaders. If you haven't heard JSB before, you're in for a treat.

I so love the bling of bright, shiny e-objects

2009-03-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

Everyone has an addiction, attraction, can't-do-without object. Chocolate, TV, sailing, cheeseburgers, new movies, old books. Pick your poison, name the habit that compels you. I'll go first and confess that mine is software, especially new ones in the social media variety. It is such an exciting time to be curious about the capabilities and mind-boggling affordances of new applications of the Web and more specifically, Web 2.0 tools.

If you haven't surfed out much deeper than FaceBook, you're missing the wave. My favorite wonder tools include screen capture with Jing and I can't live without Google Scholar (help, I've fallen here in academic, peer reviewed resources and I can't get up!). Indeed, I am attracted like moth to a flame to most things Google. While I'm on the topic a few horrid Googly exceptions include the failed ASU-backed virtual world Lively (was not!) and the anti-Wikipedia pothole called Knol (I won't even link to it. Don't go there. Go to Wikipedia, and make what we collectively know better, more, stronger.)

Yes, I love bright shiny objects of the Web. I could list 100 that collectively keep me up burning midnight electricity, but why list mine when Jane Hart does such a great job of listing, describing, and more importantly ranking based on the votes of people just like me. Well, not exactly like me. Jane's crowd is much more diverse so Google Scholar comes in at #42 this last year. Take a look at the list, and if you're not familiar with anything in the top 50, you're missing out on learning, finding, sharing, organizing, and shaping knowledge. Start exploring and I promise, you'll soon find the tool that's just the right fit for a need you've had forever. Plus, it will keep you away from the chocolate, TV and other distractions on your list.

Jane's List of 100 learning tools, one more time.

Digital Writing Support Tools

2009-02-24T14:15:00.000-08:00

Major Resources Found on this Post:

ASU Library resources for online/digital scholarship

Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) tools

RefWorks at ASU

Rubistar: Creating and sharing rubrics

Rutger's: Plagiarism made simple (and fun)

Creating a BlackBoard assignment (visual)

Tools to help students
One aspect of technology where higher education has worked collaboratively and created a strong community of practice is in the area of student writing.

Software, sites and shared ideas are available to all student seeking to improve their writing and to the instructor that is looking for materials to help with specific aspects of student work.

Beginning locally, the ASU Library has a site with resources for online students. Their tutorials section has an extensive set of short, easy to understand guides into beginning a research paper or project.
Starting earlier in the process, the Purdue Online Writing Lab offers an open set of resources for instructors and students. Instructors wishing to help a student with a particular problem (outlines, brainstorming, the meaning of a paragraph, grammar, academic writing, APA...) will find help, language and examples on the OWL site.
An important part of scholarly work is being able to synthesize readings and research, and instructors can incorporate the use of RefWorks by reviewing a student's annotated citations before allowing them to begin writing. You will find the RefShare Web function of RefWorks an excellent way of sharing resources. Colleen has a public example online, and Yale Medical School has a nice tutorial on uses of RefShare.

Techniques in online pedagogy
For faculty teaching online or in reduced seat time (hybrid) formats, a number of best practices can be considered in creating a learner-supportive environment:

set clear standards and expectation.

A rubric sets objective standards that allow the learner to critique their work before submission. Rubistar provides free tools and support for creating effective rubrics, as well as providing a site for sharing by assignment category. Here's one for a persuasive essay.

Provide an overview set of resources on scholarly writing, plagiarism, and standards for the discipline before assigning writing projects. Students often don't associate certain writing practices with "plagiarism". Rutgers University has an excellent, informal, light-hearted review of plagiarism and what it means to be an intellectually honest college student.

Consider making writing more public via posting writing assignments in the Blackboard discussion board so that students can see other posts, comments, critiques.

Posting work in a public Blog e-portfolio also assists in helping the student to take more ownership of the work and in having them see themselves as public writers.

Provide a framework for student critique and revision. GoogleDocs at MyASU might be a great tool for both collaborative writing and peer review assignments.

Be very specific in addressing the student's weakest writing point. OWL is a very good site for breaking these down and offering aids to improve that issue.

One simple practice for Instructors...
If you're still using the Blackboard Drop Box, stop! Create a BB assignment. It allows you to assign comments in the gradebook, where students focus much more of their attention than red markings on a paper. Tom Angelo (Classroom Assessment Techniques) often reminds us that red marks on paper aren't as effective as summarizing improvement needs. All your hard work can be lost if you don't reach the student where they are.

Not every student can be a great writer, but every student can be taught to be a better, clearer, more scholarly writer.

Screen Capture Tool - with Audio

2009-02-24T13:22:00.000-08:00

Many instructors want to use new social tools and media, but worry that their students will struggle with accounts, features, understanding and options when faced with learning a new technology. Now, there's Jing, a free screen capture tool that allows you to shape and capture either a simple PNG screen shot, or an animated audio narration saved in SWF format. Very simple, straightforward and fast to produce visual examples and step-by-step instructions.

Jing Pro ($14.95 a year) allows you to capture as MPG4 and to upload straight to YouTube. It also strips all Jing branding from your material. Free can't be beat, and Jing Pro is worth the very small cost if you'll be doing a lot of documentation and want to make the most of it. Uploading to YouTube is helpful, as you will need to determine where to store your images and video if producing SWF videos with the freeware version. I put them up on my Website, but it is a few more steps. See my quick, easy video on sharing RefWorks folders.

Another BlackBoard Post: Assessment

2009-02-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

The main reason so many learning designers embrace the new social media options out on the Web is they work well. They're easy to use, intuitive, collaborative, engaging...all the things we would want from e-learning tools. All the things we don't have in our current course management tools.

Anyone familiar with BlackBoard (and most of the other CMS/LMS still out there) deeply knows the love/hate emotions felt in daily use. Klunky, slow, hard to customize, with deep engagement tools hidden under ugly default skins and too-many-clicks. OK, let's accept that and move on, talking only about affordance and value. And today, let's talk about assessment.
Online testing is an option that can change the way our students look at testing. But only if the instructor is open to that shift. BlackBoard provides the options for:
- allowing multiple attempts
- choosing to record the highest, last, first, or average score from attempts
- provide feedback on each wrong answer
- randomize questions
- and more.
The instructor has so many options now on creating not just simple assessments, but 'mastery learning experiences' for the student. By letting the student take the test multiple times, we're encouraging them to rethink material they didn't understand, and creating a support environment (rather than judgement)for their learning.

Sadly, many instructors miss the opportunity to make assessment part of the learning because creating tests in BlackBoard is NOT intuitive. So let's walk through a few simple, semi-hidden choices.

Tests are created in test manager within the Control Panel. BlackBoard has a decent help file on options and actions here (under Assessment).

Less Basic: You can also create a large pool of possible questions, used across tests or courses, and import them into your test. Pool questions have no point value on creation and are assigned points when added to your test.

Before creating the questions, do take a look at the 15+ types of questions that Blackboard supports (described under assessment home page). All questions are self-grading, except the essay question. For this question, students will receive a message after submission that their exam needs grading.

Details:
You've created a test. It's ready to go. Go where? Ah, that was never clear, was it? We deploy a test in a very different way than we created the test.

Deploying a test:
Pick the area where the students will go to take the test. You can put an announcement up that test is available, but you still need to choose where. You can link from the announcement, but link to where? Many instructors create a folder in Course Documents, Assignments or even off the root navigation menu. Wherever you decide, go to that area, and in Edit View, click on Test.

From this view, a list of your undeployed tests will appear, and choose the one you wish to deploy. You now make choices from all the deployment options by clicking on Modify Test Options. This is where you choose from Multiple attempts, amount of time allowed, dates/times available, randomizing questions (not different questions, just order of questions), etc. Go down the page, and answer each question/click box according to your choices.

Some practical advice on deployment:
- Don't choose 'Force Completion'. It often causes the test to freeze on a student, doesn't allow them back in, etc. Setting time allowed will provide similar control, without the bugs.
- Setting Presentation Mode for questions "One at a Time" makes it VERY hard for students to pace themselves. Do consider this in selecting. Submit, and the test will be available in the area designated, for the times you've chosen.

More options: Only in the latest version has BlackBoard allowed instructors to set grade for highest/lowest/first/average attempt. Earlier, only the last attempt was stored. To allow students to earn their highest score (thus encouraging them to try again, instead of 'holding' at 9 out of 10), you have to go yet another place.
Open the grade center, go to the column for the deployed test. IF you set test for multiple attempts allowed, a new option will appear under Column Information. This is a pull-down box for "Score attempts using". Here is the hidden set of choices for allowing highest/average/first attempt. Hidden, but valuable teaching tool.

Grading/Viewing: In the gradebook, a pencil mark will appear for each learner/completed submission. Rest your cursor on the exclamation mark, and a 'grade details' option appears. Click on that. Another page appears, which allows you to 'View Attempt'. If you have an essay question to grade, or want to give feedback to the student, this is where you would do that.

Close your books: One other option available at ASU is the Respondus LockDown Browser. For instructors asking for a way to ensure that students don't go to the Web or other resources to look up answers during the exam, here's a way to 'lock' them into the test window until they've submitted. This also prevents them from copying/pasting the test and sharing with another student. Enable this from the Control Panel on any deployed test.

So many choices. So many options to design an exam that:
- helps the student learn
- makes it easy for you to grade
- makes it easy for you to give feedback (auto and personal)
- ensures that tests aren't copied or shared

Let me know if you have questions, ideas or comments on use of online tests for even better learning and teaching!

"Is our students learning?" (GWB)

2008-12-02T11:57:00.001-08:00

The fact is, in higher education we really don't know. Unlike the standards of measure now being applied in K-12 through No Child Left Behind (draconian or controversial as they may be thought), no measures of success are demanded of higher education. Enrollment numbers, how smart students were before they arrived, how successful a football team...all are the current and inappropriate measures of value in today's colleges and universities.

So students continue to accrue previously unimaginable debt and nothing except the cost of an education seems to change in America. Many in HE have been waiting for a collapse similar to the shocking changes made to general medical care. We asked the medical industry to change, they didn't, and HMOs swept in and changed health care from the outside. One wonders who/what will have the authority to act as education's HMO? Private, for-profits like University of Phoenix with 225,000+ online students in 7 years? Community colleges asking for the ability to offer bachelor's degrees in a new 'communiversity' model? A public fed up with an institution that recognizes no customer and no obligation to serve? Higher education should step to the plate. It has a wealth of brain power that should be capable of a more thoughtful approach to solving its serious problems.

Kevin Carey asked some great questions recently about what it would take for HE to wake up and begin considering needed change. Seems everyone on the outside recognizes that HE is no longer offering the education the student and society wants or needs.
Seems if we put our heads together, those on the inside could come up with some ideas on how to drive down cost, improve access, increase desperately needed, new 21st century skills. Sadly, it also seems that we need to do it when our HE leaders (dressed in their finery/living the high life/increasing tuition AND lower division class size/jetting around the world)aren't looking.

At least Bill and Melinda Gates know a problem when they see it. And unlike our fat and happy HE leaders, the Gates Foundation wants to solve it. I think the thoughtful, working folk of HE should submit ideas to help them do just that.

Why we need a change in Washington

2008-10-18T17:27:00.001-07:00

Recession. Health care. Women's rights to their body and their privacy. America's decreasing reputation, influence and place in the world. Our education system. The environment. Belief in the need for alternative energy sources. Thoughtful policies on changing the economic tailspin. We've all heard it, and we understand the very difficult choices ahead for the issues of our nation.
But the media is increasingly quiet about another nation many miles away. The death count continues to rise, the medical injuries are astronomic, and still John McCain claims our right to occupy Iraq for another hundred years.

Lest we forget, because the numbers and the caskets and carnage are being kept from us by an 'embedded' media:
American dead: +4,000
American wounded/damaged/maimed forever: +30,000
* data from globalsecurity.org as of Oct 2008

Our domestic problems are in the forefront of election news and ideas, but it would be a heartless cruelty not to remember, and track, and understand what we've done in Iraq and to Iraq. May God forgive us. May the citizens of Iraq forgive us, including the 50,000+ marching in the streets of Baghdad yesterday, demanding we leave now. May the world forgive us. And even if they don't, may we begin to take action to leave the oil and the grief and the occupation behind so that we can begin to forgive ourselves.

A Short Post on Palin and the Big Picture

2008-10-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

This is a Blog on innovation technologies and use in higher education, but speaking on the Viet Nam war, MLK said "A time comes when silence is betrayal. "

Now is one of those times. Invasion. Recession. Poverty. Homelessness. A government that protects the wealthy and allows New Orleans to disappear. A leadership that permits so many Americans to go without the simplest essentials while making enemies of the world.

I watched the VP debate this evening and I am having trouble coming to terms with Sarah. She distracts me. Leaves me speechless. She's so sure and so grounded in the lack of need for knowledge. There is much of what she IS that I respect: funny, grounded, earthy, determined, energetic, charming, folksy, real. Pretty and rugged doesn't hurt. Ooh Alaska!

What causes deep conflict is that she doesn't respect the things I hold inherent: intellect, study, discovery, knowledge, deep thought, ambiguity and wonder. She's read 'all' the newspapers but can't name one? Can't name one supreme court decision except Roe V Wade? Has no idea what the Bush Doctrine might be? Talks gibberish when asked direct questions? Doesn't suffer doubt or considerations of others' ideas? Doesn't worry about the big city people that now live in tents and lost everything while her family became comfy on Alaska bounty and oil revenue returns?

Sarah: this is not a game. America is hurting here!

MLK was right. Silence is betrayal when our country needs the voice of the people to speak up, speak out, be heard. I am an American and a woman and I admire Sarah Palin.

But I do matter, and so do the homeless in tent cities and 'East coast' city dwellers SP dismisses with her crinkly grimace.

I matter and I have a voice. I will soon be "Reduced in Force" (laid off) by a University I served for 17 years. My city has 20,000 empty homes in foreclosure and an anticipated 26,000 more to come in the next few months. We are a big city and we matter. We live in the desert and we matter.

I am voting for Barack Obama and Joe Biden in November.

I Still Love/Adore/Worship Google: Spreadsheet LookUps

2008-10-02T12:10:00.000-07:00

Despite a few stumbles in the recent past (especially the offensive Knol, for which I won't even provide link), the Google kids astound me on a regular basis. There is so much, coming so quickly, I don't even have time to explore a new, disruptive/transformative tool or service before they provide another. And yet, getting under the hood, finding the deep features or integration gems within these tools, is where the real beauty of Google resides.

Here's my latest, which I'm quickly discovering that most of my high-tech friends are equally in the dark over. We should have intuited the possibilities, given that it's GOOGLE providing the service, and realized that search logic would be embedded, but we're not as smart as Google so we never imagined how...or how beautifully.

So,Google Spreadsheets provides the creator (you) with the ability to do a Google Search (Lookup function) on another cell. If I put "George Washington" in cell A1, I can do a dynamic look up of his birthday in A2 with a function =GoogleLookup(A1,"place of birth") . Here's Google's explanation of the function GoogleLookup. After it does the lookup, it also stores the sites where the information was found and verified. Rest your cursor on the response to see them.

Tell me, how cool is that? Wait! It gets better. I can then populate cells for that column with like information. When I click on the cell holding "George Washington", a small blue box appears in the lower right corner. Just as with Excel, you could pull down from that box and populate the column with many, many cells filled with our beloved first president. BUT, unlike Excel, when you hold down the CTRL key as you pull down through the column, Google will populate with other instances/objects/things that are 'like George Washington'.
Give it a try, and depending on how deep down into the column you pull your cursor, you'll see our other beloved (and not so beloved) presidents appear. Hand-enter a number of cells to better narrow the data. (eg: Enter Los Angeles and Phoenix if you want large cities; entering just Phoenix will return cities in AZ. Google chooses its own definition of 'like' and it may not be as same as yours if it doesn't have enough data).

Here's the thing...Google is NOT as smart as you. So you'll have to check the data returned, even if you're specific. I needed to erase "Benjamin Franklin" from the data on U.S. presidents. He's 'like George Washington", but not a president. I knew that, Google didn't.

Same with cities and populations. I created a list of American cities 'like Los Angeles" (SF, NY, Chicago, etc) and then did a LookUp on population. Google nailed it, but instead of population for Philly, it gave me "10,882 sq/miles"). Huh?

It also gave me the correct population for San Antonio, but doing a LookUp on state in another column, it gave me Puerto Rico. Huh? Not like, unlike, except in Google's flat world.

Thus, a thing of beauty but only as smart as the metatags. A great case for the need to infuse information literacy into the expected outcomes of 21st century education. And a great example of why we love Google in emergent learning, but desperately need a digital literacy curriculum that focuses on critical thinking, evaluation, meaning and the notion of ownership over mere acceptance. Teach them to use the information at their fingertips, and then to evaluate the returns.

Here's the demo sheet, if you want to see results in action: Google Spreadsheet w/Lookups and populated columns. You must try it yourself to actually get in there and wander around in the data and functions, though. Publishing takes away the dynamic aspects of seeing the functions, markers, references, etc. And owning and creating your data is much more fun. For those of you watchin the stock market tumble, check out how you can use Google's related GoogleFinance function to look up stocks, current prices, track the tumbles, etc.

Hey, not until I published my spreadsheet did I see that Google adds citation mark and all the referenced LookUps at the bottom of the document on publishing. It justs gets better and better. Now, let's start worrying about a world where Google owns the information channels, tools and data services of the digital age. Somebody start creating applications and services as beautiful as Google's. Please.

Meta-Reflection in a time of jest politics

2008-09-16T13:46:00.000-07:00

Can't help dwelling on David Foster Wallace and how much he contributed to my understanding of how seldom we experience deep reflection. Hit and run thought is the currency of the constant, tuned in & digital moment. Reflection was DFW's way of being in the world, brought on perhaps by sadness and worry, making meaning through thought rethought annotation and explanation.

He could make me crazy, wishing for an easier read. And he could make me revel in the wonder and humor and depth and 'smartness' and dogged pursuit of theme. And I am so much the less for our loss of him.

So, I'm driven to stop the course of my day and think about thinking about thought on a topic of meta-reflection. Here's where it leads me:
- I'm out of step and a woman not of this time. Evidence: I took one of those inane work-smart personality tests recently. What did I learn? I should work on assertiveness, participation in social activities, and less waffling and subjectivity in my decision making. Bleccchhhh. If I had wanted to be Caribou Barbie, I'd maneuver a place on some rigid, assertive, only-our-way platform. My quiet, perhaps obsessive reflections and desire to get it right - even if it looks like waffling/revising/annotating/allowing multiple views has served me well in technology and so I guess this is here (somewhere) that I'll stay. If I had DFW's talent, I'd be writing 1000+ page tomes on the nature of it all explored in small moments and large themes, but instead...I'll think about designing perfect online courses where every voice is heard and every mind constructs their own understanding at their own pace in their own way. I think DFW would approve.

And I'll ignore workplace profiling that suggests women like Sarah Palin are the new role model: uncompromising, non-collaborative, "won't blink" (don't her eyes hurt??), no time or interest in her children (I know, none of my business...consequences be damned), mean-spirited, take-no-prisoners, & small. Not small-town for I've been there and done that...prefer it to city life...just small & small-minded. And I don't care how successful it makes one, man or woman, I want a quieter, more reflective mind and a kinder, bigger, more doubtful life.

I want to take the time to read writers like DFW, but sadly, (and here's my point IF I have one) there is no other writer like DFW and there is now no DFW. And as interesting as this current election is turning out to be in examination of presence over ideas, it hurts to think about it. We need tools to do it. Here's one from the Bamboo Project Blog: Debriefing Yourself.

A gift to all the hard, fast, mean-spirited folk that didn't have time or interest in the meta-thought and ideas of David Foster Wallace. Be careful when reading. You may wind up changing your mind. But, the good news is that, unlike your present state, you may also change the minds and lives of others.

Wings of the Butterfly

2008-08-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

Aug 31, Phoenix: I stare desolate into the water of my pool today, safe water, set deep in a dry dry desert, while the people of New Orleans once again head for safety. My thoughts are with them and I'm hoping, this time, the energy and resources of our government are with them as well.

Too infrequently, I step away from the information overload of this news, of my work, of my little life and step into the quiet overload of my digital connections. First, Google Reader and my feeds. I am smarter for my connections and the smart people I follow. Then, I scan Twitter for things I should know about friends, colleagues, and again, people I admire. Where are they? What are they doing? What's new? Last, I look at what's happening with my peeps on FaceBook, LinkedIn, Epsilen. Only when I have the time (like a Labor Day weekend) and usually late at night if I can't sleep. I'm not a digital junkie, nor am I the quotidian type who builds hobby into the daily flow. Zen practice/being of the moment doesn't quite seem to align with surfing for random data that crosses my screen. So I make my moments there when longing for connection, news, new ideas, something...else.

This week, it brought me right back to my practice. Dave Pollard tweeted a just do it call for people to read "Life is a Verb" and the language was so passionate I thought "Why not?"
A bit Artist's Way, bit self-help, bit art, bit judgmental. And worth the effort, IF you make the effort. Patti Digh offers story and exercises that help us connect with living intentionally, joyously, loudly. You shouldn't just read it, you should do it. I'm going to try. To be more aware, more mindful, more in touch with life in the moment. And do the homework. For 37 days. Patti has inspired me to carry my camera and capture the moments fleeting by. I'll post one, every day, for 37 days. Funny that a Buddhist would need to find her practice out in a tweet, but wherever we go...there we are.
Life is a Verb.
Yes, it is. Buy it, and buy one for a friend that needs it.

Closing Pandora's Box

2008-08-23T22:53:00.000-07:00

And they say it couldn't be done. But it can, when Draconian legislation aimed at curbing Internet access is allowed to succeed. Pandora Web radio is thinking about shutting its doors. Here's the story from ReadWriteWeb. Perhaps the music giants, clueless as to the value of Pandora in promoting music, wouldn't be able to manipulate our distinctly integrity-challenged men in Washington if we weren't a virtual community. Hard enough to get us out of our pajamas, let alone into the streets. If Iraq didn't do it, how can the loss of Pandora?

Sometimes I feel really alone here, hovering over the glow of a technology fire while politicians (and the people who buy politicians) are doing bad, bad things out there in the physical world. Internet petitions aren't working. Ironic that we might need physical bodies in action to save an Internet radio station...but what else would work? If I can save the world - starting with Pandora - from my couch, let me know how.

Feeling flu-ish

2008-08-11T16:24:00.000-07:00

Fun experiment I'm passing on from Patti Anklam, tracing the diffusion of ideas. It's the Happy Flu app, and you too can watch distributed knowledge move around the grid. If you have a Blog, click 'spread it', copy the code, move the trace along. Here's Patti, me and maybe you. (Move scroll bar down to capture image if too distant)