Category Archives: Authoring

Getting Started? Part Two

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As promised, below are the rest of the tips for getting started with technology:

  • Do not assume all students are tech whizbangs.

    Many have discussed the juxtaposition of “digital natives,” aka, students, and “digital immigrants,” aka, many instructors.  Consequently, the general perception is that students are tech-savvy, multi-tasking individuals who can do anything and everything technological without blinking an eye.

    However, plenty of case studies will point out that many students can be surprisingly tentative, nervous, and tech-averse.  Even if students are adept with texting or downloading MP3s, they do not come to your class automatically ready to blog about course topics or eager to create a digital story based on their analysis of War and Peace.

    Be honest and open with your students.  Even if you are comfortable with the technology, you may need some time to adjust to the new approach, and your students may need even more time and guidance to adjust.  Everyone can benefit from a “we’re in this together” approach.

    Additionally, you might consider asking students about their previous experiences with technology-enhanced learning.  Unfavorable past experiences can predispose students to be resistant to future encounters with technology in their courses.

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  • Be prepared for things to deviate from expectations.

    Using a tech tool for the first time is like using any other tool for the first time: Unpredictable things can happen.

    We all know technical difficulties can occur at any time.  Planning ahead and testing help ward off major snafus, but some glitches may not be discoverable until a course goes live.

    Try to remain calm and go with the flow.

    Adopt the attitude that if some aspect does not go quite as planned, then it is a learning experience.

    Instructors are always evaluating their teaching by assessing what works and what does not work. Stir the use of technology tools into your usual reflections upon your teaching.  If something technology-oriented does not work as anticipated, learn from it, and do it differently next time.

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  • Consider re-thinking some approaches.

    • Technology often requests that you re-think some established ideas.

    For example, how do you define cheating on an online quiz?  Classic deterrents to cheating on auto-graded quizzes are the use of pools to randomize questions and the application of time limits.  Despite such tactics, motivated, determined students can find ways to look up or share answers.

    Maybe you could re-think this kind of cheating.  Maybe the goal is for students to spend maximal time with the content–no  matter what form that might take.  Maybe referencing books and notes is not all bad. It depends on the content and the learning goals.

    Yes, technology can facilitate some kinds of cheating. Nonetheless, students who prefer cheating to studying will always find ways to cheat, even if they are in the room with the instructor.

     

  • Think of technology as just another family of teaching tools.

    • Try to think of technology as just another tool or method in your established portfolio of teaching tools and methods.  In and of itself, technology is neither good nor bad, magical nor toxic.  The way technology is used is the key.

    Ever since technology burst upon education, it has been examined in isolation, perhaps because of its newness, its novelty, its steep learning curve, its variety, and its constant change.

    However, by separating technology from established instructional methods, we risk making it seem bigger, scarier, and more difficult to incorporate into teaching and learning than anything other tool or approach.

    For those who are new to teaching with technology, using such new tools may still feel that way.  The good news is that they are learning and experimenting despite it all!

    Going forward, technology would, ideally, be examined and studied alongside other teaching tools and methods.

     

  • Be open to growth and change.

    • Technology is constantly changing. New possibilities present themselves before we feel comfortable with what was “new” five minutes ago.

    Teaching is similarly dynamic.  Instructors are continually reflecting upon their teaching and striving to make it more effective.

    Combining these two active and productive fields means growth and change are always on the horizon. The more you work with technology, the more comfortable you will become with the changes and the more adept you will be at identifying which tech tools can effectively help you and your students achieve your teaching and learning goals.

Mobility initiative?

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Does anyone know if there is a mobility initiative at UTA? Or does OIT have plans for a mobility initiative?

I’m torn between buying a class set of the iTouch or the iPhone for my Computers and Fiction Writing class and would welcome advice. Might OIT support either? Any sign of daLite lecterns or other kinds of support?

I will talk to the folks at UTD who made such a splash at SXSW to see how they are handling things. (Was anyone there for the presentation?) Their locative media works and initiatives are making waves.

cg

Getting Started?

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Instructors feel pressure to incorporate technology into their teaching: institutional pressure, collegial pressure, student pressure, and societal pressure.  If you are an instructor who is not particularly comfortable working beyond word processing and e-mail, then technology can quickly become a bête noire.

Below are the first five of ten tips for getting started. The tips are borne out of my experiences working with a variety of instructors with a range of technology skills and affinities. The goal is to make the prospect of teaching with technology a little less daunting and the bête a little less noire.

The progressive thinkers who post regularly to this blog have expansive, forward-thinking ideas that will likely form the basis of future teaching and learning. Those contributors may find this list too provincial.

While I agree that the ideal marriage of technology and education involves rethinking from the ground up, I am not looking in that direction here.  My hope is to encourage those who are starting to walk.  After you walk, you will be ready to run, and then you will fly with the wing walkers.

  • Be sure that content and learning objectives are always your guides. Technology is not the end product nor is using technology the goal. Technology is a tool that is effective only when it helps your students achieve the learning objectives. Technology can be the catalyst for learning.Before you consider using blogs, wikis, or any other technology tool, think carefully think about your content and the learning goals.
    • Is there a goal that your students often have trouble achieving?
    • Is there a task your students regularly have a hard time realizing?
    • Is there an activity your students do not practice enough in class?
    • Are there materials you have always wanted your students to access but that have not been available?

    If you answered yes to any of these questions, then technology may be able to help.

    Even though the advice to avoid using technology for technology’s sake has become trite, it remains sound.  Better to pass on technology than to tack it on to you course because you feel you have to in order to keep up with the times. 

  • Know that one size does not fit all. You know your content, and you know what it takes for students to learn in your course.  Consequently, with your expertise and some exploration, you can identify the kinds of technologies that can potentially help you teach and help your students learn.Like other teaching approaches and tools, a tech tool that works swimmingly for art history may not be at all effective for political science.  Be inspired by what others are doing, but try not to feel like you have to do the same thing. Never stray from the needs of your content.

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  • Start small if you feel tentative.Instructors do not have to start integrating technology into their courses by completely re-working everything from a to z.  Using tech tools is not an all-or-nothing choice.Everyone is at a different place on the tech-savvy spectrum.  No matter where you start, you have plenty of room to grow.
    • Start small.
    • Identify and try a technology tool.
    • Become comfortable with one technology tool.
    • Note how you learned and how you became comfortable with that technology tool.
    • Evaluate that technology tool’s effectiveness.
    • Gain confidence.
    • Repeat the process.

    The first venture is usually the most difficult.   After navigating and surviving once, you will be calmer, more confident, and better equipped to consider other technology tools that can help you and your students achieve more learning goals.

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  • Plan ahead.Generally, planning and developing prior to launching contribute significantly to the effectiveness of technology-enhanced instruction.Ideally, time would be available to
    • Think through the teaching and learning needs.
    • Learn and reach a comfort level with the technology.
    • Plan carefully your use of technology.
    • Test your technology piece (so you can identify kinks and troubleshoot as many problems as you can before students find them).

    Realistically, time is a luxury. You may not have time to design, develop, and test your technology before your course starts, so you have no choice but to develop as you go.

    If you do have a choice, then start planning and developing before launching. My guess is that if you were to ask instructors who have implemented technology-enhanced instruction both by developing ahead of time and by developing while teaching, they would recommend developing ahead of time if at all possible. 

  • Become well acquainted with the technology you are using.You do not have to become a card-carrying member of the Best Buy Geek Squad, but you will feel more sure of yourself if you attain a comfort level with your technology tool before asking your students to use it.Even though UTA offers many resources for tech support, your students will ask you questions about how to post comments to your blog or how to record a clip with Audacity. Completely unforeseen questions will arise.  They always do.  At that point, of course, you can take time to research or call upon tech support.  If you can help with the basics, though, everyone benefits.

Ego, Passion, Desire, Love, Respect, Relationship, and Attention Span

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My reading of the posts in this blog, and the links posted by the writers, got me to thinking and wondering about attention span.

What is the research on long attention span? I find we talk a lot about short attention spans when dealing with lectures. However, people of many ages seem to be able to attend for long periods of time when involved in other tasks: games, sports, creative writing, other kinds of writing, conversation, falling in love and obsessing on the person of one’s focus, mulling over an unsolvable situation – constantly and continually, obsessing on an idea — reading, writing, and talking about it, telling one’s own stories over and over … and over, watching a movie, playing guitar, doing research, partaking of an exciting discussion where we want to jump in.

So what is it about education that puts students to sleep and bores them?

I understand those who state that students do not listen to and absorb ideas in greater than 10-15 minute segments, when those ideas are produced in the form of a lecture. Most of us have experienced students’ nodding off or their attention wandering, as we closely watch what they are taking in when we are talking.

I have also noticed in my German Media on the Web class, taught in a computer classroom, that the computer seems to hypnotize students, and they must literally be pulled away in order to, as a group, attend to small group discussion, or to listen to anything I have to say, or to do a task like providing me with ideas about stereotypes of Switzerland which I can then put on the board for all to see. (My ideal German media on the web classroom: computers, break-out areas for small group or whole class interaction, chalk/white board for brainstorming, and screen for examples and shots of critical websites — also a latte machine.)

So what happens in the brain that makes students nod off or lose the thread when listening to lectures? What makes me nod off when listening to someone? What is it about a computer that hypnotizes students in a face-to-face class with computers in the classroom? And, on the other hand, what makes me attend again to a lecture (if the lecturer is not someone like the great Hans Kellner, who I understand mesmerized students when he was here)?

I’m coming to the conclusion that it has to do with what is happening in the brain and how the brain is processing ideas. It may have to do with tapping in to “expertise” and “experience,” and what we ourselves are bringing to the table. It may have to do with passive reception of authoritative knowledge versus bringing an attitude, an interest, a motivation, an agenda, or previous knowledge and understanding to the task of “listening to a lecture” – or a different frame of reference – different from that of the instructor – SCARY, or doing a different kind of task. It may have to do with choice. It may have to do with having a real reason for attending to ideas. A real reason for attending a face-to-face class. A real reason for attending an online course.

The following story is an example of what I’m talking about:
I recently attended a lecture, and I sat next to a student who was nodding off. I realized that the speaker was very knowledgeable, but that there wasn’t much that students without background knowledge in the field could grasp onto. I realized that I too was a bit bored by it all, until – until I heard the speaker say something that tapped into my understanding and previous knowledge, and that tapped into a new idea (for me) that I began having about the subject matter – an “aha” experience. After that, and for the rest of the lecture, I listened attentively, because I wanted to see if what he said continued to fit into this new framework or frame of reference that was happening in my mind. There was now a reason for listening to the lecture that far surpassed “getting information” from him or “politely thinking about the topic” – a real reason, my reason. The reason for attending had to do with me – not with him. I was having a new thought separate from him, I was enjoying that experience, and I was gleaning the “confidence” fallout from having what I considered a good idea, and I was enjoying making connections! Pleasure!

How do we get away from the fear and the “knowing” that students have about us – that if they say something we do not like, it will affect their grade? Some students don’t care. Others are quiet because of this. How do we avoid being the professor who said, “I don’t know what you think about this poem, [or theory or factoid], and I don’t care”? Even when students frustrate the heck out of us?

So learning theorists and scholars, am I on the right track? Is engagement something much more than attending and “being there” mentally? Is it passion-, desire-, even ego-driven? Is true learning perhaps totally passion-driven? Think of people like Einstein who let everything go in order to think all the time. Is it relationship? Do we hate to interact with profs who disdain us and therefore leave their content behind? Do we love to interact with profs who respect us and become energized and we change our majors because of them? Do we know the difference? (Yes, of course.) Do we as profs love to interact with students where there is mutual respect – they for us and we for them? If we disdain our students, do we sabotage learning? If they disdain us or are afraid of our grading them, how do we change that?

We guide them, compassionately, to the challenge. It is our prompts, our thinking, our interventions that make the difference. But it’s not the punitive and rigid intervention of the past. It has to be something different. Or?

Are these ideas too “affective?” I don’t think so, if we go beyond the surface of what is being said. After all, we are not organisms that are made up of three separate parts: body, mind, and emotions/spirit. We are whole organisms, whose affect plays a great part in our intellectual endeavor: what we choose, why, with whom we interact, and the environment in which we either develop our capacities or kill them, or something in between. “Create an environment in which people can thrive.” How do we do that for all students who are willing, no matter what their background?

When Staleness Creeps In To Your Content

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No matter how student-centered you are, no matter how often you tell others you are not a “teacher” but a “coach”, at some point you are going to be putting some content in to your course.  Even coaches will sit down their players and show them how to do things on a regular basis. Your students need to hear from you – and I don’t just mean a weekly due date reminder or an occasional “atta boy” comment.  Students need to hear your take on issues, facts, controversies, current events, trends, etc.

For most of us, a blog has been the extent of how we keep the content flowing while avoiding the creation of online textbook monuments.  Blogs are great for that, but they do have a few short-comings.  For one, they tend to be text heavy – which can grow stale after a while. You can insert images, videos, and audio clips in posts – but that takes a lot more time and effort to accomplish even after you have produced the media.  And even if you own a iPhone, blogging is much easier if you are sitting at a desk. Blogging on the go sounds great, but it is still pretty time-consuming.  If only there were a way to make this all easier…

Enter in to this equation Posterous.  Their tag line says it all: “The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.”  That is the basic idea – but here is low-down. You create an account, based on your email. Then you create an email and send it in. Posterous takes your email and turns it in to a blog post. The subject becomes your title and the body becomes your post. But that is not all. You can add tags with ease.  But you can also attach images, audio files, and videos – and Posterous will crunch it all for you and add it to your post. You can even designate where you want the pictures to go in the post.

But that is not where it stops. Posterous will then push that content out to any site you want it to:  Twitter, Picassa, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, and even a WordPress blog (there are even a few sites they publish to that I had never heard of).  They only give you about a Gigabyte or so of storage (you can buy more) – but you can always use other sites to hold your larger media – like videos (on YouTube).  Posterous does all of the heavy lifting for all of that.

So how can this help the educator/coach/what-we-are-supposed-to-call-ourselves-now? Well, for one – it makes mobile blogging much easier.  There is even an app that lets you take advantage of the built-in camera on your smart phone to shake things up a bit each week. After a couple of weeks of text blogs – why not record yourself and post a video blog? Or why not go somewhere in the city and film something that connects with your content? A civic event, an art exhibit, building architecture, etc?  Maybe even go talk to a colleague or content expert and record the conversation (with permission, of course), and then upload that audio one week as a blog post. I know these will not be the best produced videos in the world, but the spontaneous nature of them will give the students a sense that they are “following you around” as you practically apply what is being taught in class.

Why not even make it seem more like a tour of your subject? You serve as the lead journalist of the group. Take them on a tour of the city from the perspective of your subject. Mix up the media (text, audio, video, images, etc) each week. Don’t get so formal with everything you say. Start off some of your posts with statements like “You know, I was pondering the engineering concepts in this week’s reading while at Starbucks – and I had this revelation about the relationship between this coffee cup and this week’s subject.”  But really film yourself at Starbucks having the revelation.

The less you script it out for yourself, the more fun you will have and the more students will enjoy it.

Remember what I posted a few weeks ago about Delicious as content? Posterous can push your content to Delicious. So add your class tags every week and your content will be inserted in to your class stream on Delicious seamlessly.

Oh – and don’t forget those web cams on your desktop computer. You don’t necessarily have to have a smart phone to do any of this. I know this might be hard to believe, but good revelations can also hit us while we are sitting at our desks.  So do some media productions there if you like.

(this post was cross-posted at EduGeek Journal)

Creating Cuaderna Vía

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Last summer, Chris Conway and Ignacio Ruiz-Perez approached me about helping them with a new idea they had – a Spanish-language literary journal for UT Arlington students called Cuaderna Vía.  They already had an issue’s worth of content, but needed help producing the tangible journal.

Over those months, we designed and produced a print edition of Cuaderna Vía’s first issue, but I also spent time using Open Journal Systems (OJS), a component of the Public Knowledge Project, to produce our online version, found here:

http://bit.ly/bWrW6c

Cuaderna Vía is not a peer-reviewed journal – but OJS does provide the capability of setting up a peer-review, online journal.  Within the system, as the editor of a journal, you can accept manuscripts, assign reviewers to them, copy-edit them, and produce a completely customized online version of your journal.

It’s not as easy to set up as many Web 2.0 applications out there – you can’t simply log in somewhere and it’s all ready for you.  You will need to assistance of someone with passing knowledge of web database applications (preferably PHP/MySQL).  But beyond the initial setup, it’s a matter of filling in forms to set up your look and feel and routine tasks to operate your journal.

Dr. Conway and Dr. Ruiz-Perez are using it to showcase the work of their students.  I can see OJS providing an excellent learning opportunity for would-be academics – learning first hand how to be a reviewer and how to write an article able to withstand the peer-review process. OJS will also open up student work for the world to see.

The Future of Education: The ABCs vs. the EFGs

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I’ve been pondering an article called “Future Ed: Remote learning, 3D screens” for a few days now.  While this article covers some interesting geeky stuff (such as ocular implants and 3-D screens), there are also some great nuggets of wisdom in there about the notion that what we teach needs to change – along with our technologies:

Barker pointed out that with more tech-savvy learning, the curriculum will have to change, too. He and his wife funded a five-year experiment in Chattanooga, Tenn., to create a 21st-century curriculum founded not just on learning the ABCs, but also the “EFGs”: Eco ed (“How do we interact with the planet?”), Futures ed (“How do I shape my future?”), and Global ed (“What is my relationship with other human beings?”).

Each student had to learn a 500-word vocabulary in six languages and, in sixth grade, choose one in which to be fluent, including cultural knowledge. Physical fitness focused on lifelong sports such as tennis and golf, not team activities. Grade levels were kindergarten “through competence” — that is, when students accomplished all of the program’s lofty goals, they graduated.

Personally, I get more excited about these approaches to changing education than others.  The “death to the university” concept is too much “baby and bathwater” to me, and the open education movement is sometimes too caught up in hopeless romanticism (or unhealthy bitterness) for my taste. I don’t think people in either one of these movements have really thought about what would happen if they got their way.

Anyways, the article covers a lot of ground in 4 pages, so give the whole thing a read with an open mind. Assessment, socialization, and realistic school reform (i.e. ideas for change that involve educators keeping their jobs) are all covered.

This entry was originally posted at my other blog, where I went on a rambling tangent against the thought that universities as we know them are going away. Instead of bludgeoning anyone with that again, I thought I would connect the quote above to some of the ideas we have been exploring at UTA recently:

  • Eco ed – when most people think of ecology, they usually think of “green” efforts. That is a good place to start – considering how we can use technology to make our classes more environmentally friendly is always a good idea. But an additional way to think of ecology is how our classes interact with the greater subject environment that they are a  part of. How does your subject connect with the classes students had before? How will it prepare them for what classes are coming next semester? How do students apply what you are teaching to the house, apartment, neighborhood, or city that they live in? (Pete Smith will love that I am already bringing constructivism and connectivism in to this blog – or maybe he will comment on how I am making Dewey spin in his grave….)
  • Futures ed – To me, this matches exactly with what Dr. Mark Taylor has been teaching us about Generation NeXt for a few years. Students need to know what is in it for them. In fact, I think you could take the entire last teaching by Dr. Taylor and insert it right here. “How do I shape my future?” could also be translated in to “What is in this for me?” Students that can answer this question about your class will find greater value in what you teach.
  • Global ed – this is taking eco ed to the next step. What is going on in the world today that involves your subject matter? Chris Conway and Jose Tamez have been doing a great job with this in some of their Business Spanish courses by seeking out business experts from around the world. They interview these experts and then post the recordings of what transpires to teach students important global business concepts (the Ethablog by Henrique Oliveira is one great resource they bring in to their class). But even if you don’t teach a globally-focused subject, you can still find experts around the globe that are blogging and discussing your topic. Have your students visit those sites, maybe even have them leave some comments or interview some of the authors for class projects. The important idea is to get students to join the greater global conversation that surrounds your subject matter.

The one warning I have is that all of these ideas might be too much to fit in to every class if your department does not co-ordinate your courses. Take global ed for example – if students have to join a different site for a global conversation for every class they take every semester, it won’t take too long before they hit overload and just abandon them all. Maybe your department can come up with a way to hit the EFG’s from a department level – giving students a set of ideas and sites that they use over their entire degree program?

Digital Texts in the Composition Classroom, Feb 25th

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Early adopters find ways to teach complex concepts, methods and software flying by the seat of our pants to be sure, but buoyed by much early trial and error experience acquired from having taught ourselves. For someone like me, whose field is digital media, I have made that seat-of-the-pants stuff my specialty, and, as a result, I am frequently called upon to teach less-experienced others how to teach using digital tools. One particularly challenging course in the English Department is First Year Composition. It may just be the toughest course to teach well and yet it is most often taught by our least experienced staff: our graduate students.

Those students recently asked me if I would come and lead a workshop for them on digital texts for the composition classroom. These new teachers face tough hurdles trying to retool green students into better writers. Their job gets tougher every year as what constitutes ‘writing’ continues to incorporate more multimodal objects (sound, image, video, etc.). The challenge for them is tougher still because they come from a generation that is often less digitally experienced than their students. Fortunately, in the English Department at least, they are not without resources. I lead a series of workshops on digital literacies, pedagogies, and research methods that give our students some tools for their own teaching up front, but they wanted more specifics that were designed for teaching the ever-so-unforgiving Comp. This workshop will take place on Thursday, February 25th from 12:00 to 1:30 or so in the eCreate Lab, located in Preston Hall 310. Please join us if you think the material might be of interest to you too.

Free, easy-to-use authoring tools that I will be discussing will include:

Voicethread, an online brainstorming tool for discussing texts, including powerpoint, video or screencasts

ccMixter, creative commons-based audio remixes

Piclits, an online tool for adding text to an image

Mixbook, an online scrapbook creator

Glogster, an online interactive poster creation tool

Xtranormal, an online text-to-movie animation creator

and

Animoto (for education version): an automated video creator that sutures narration, images, audio and video together into 30-second ‘trailers’

Drop me an email if you want more information: carolyn (dot) guertin (at) gmail (dot) com. If you come, be prepared to get your hands dirty :-).

Cheers,
Carolyn Guertin
Director, eCreate Lab
Dept of English
https://mavspace.uta.edu/guertin/portfolio/