What was I writing about, again?

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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.