Social Media in (a small part of) the Academy

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. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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!