CC blog

the sort of assignment (I think) we want our students to create

What impresses me is that this has been viewed 541,000 times.  Our students could do work every bit as good as this.....I'm not saying this should be the only type of work they do - but certainly this should be part of the work that they do.

talking to faculty about talking to students about learning technology

Malcolm Brown's article Learning and Technology — “In That Order”  should be mandatory reading for us in the Ed. Tech tribe.

We all have stories we tell about how this or that tool can aid in teaching or learning.   Among these stories should be an emphasis on "going meta" - or "going to the balcony" and explaining to students what the learning goals were each time a new technology or tool is used.  

 

Malcolm's article has been ringing in my ears this week as I talk to faculty about Blackboard tools.  I've made it a point to spend more time engaging faculty in how they will talk about the tools with their students.

    

Getting students engaged in the "why's" of course design / development / delivery is probably a good idea on all fronts.  This may take some time from the curriculum, but will play dividends in the depth of learning.

ALI 2009

Just finished up my second DCAL Active Learning Institute (ALI 2009) http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dcal/workshops/ALI.html

One of the things we learn at ALI is that we don't learn something unless we do something - the speaker or the writer or the teacher is the learner.

Another thing we learn is that memories, concepts and facts are not pulled from our brains like a computer from a hard drive, but are reconstructed at each use as an archeologist reconstructs artifacts from a dig.

So in order to consolidate my thinking and insure that my future self will have an accurate record of present day recollections I thought I'd write up this blog.

Main Thoughts:

1)  It was a relief to be able to enjoy ALI has a cross between an Institute developer / facilitator and participant.  My actual presentation duties were light, 30 minutes with Anthony on using the Blackboard blog for in-class active learning exercises.  This gave me the luxury of listening a great deal and talking less (a skill I'm working to improve).  So much of my job feels like a push against a status quo.  At ALI it felt really good to let some other folks do most of the pushing, allowing me to learn about how they try to bring about change and learn some new things along the way.

2) Ironically the parts of ALI that stick with me most are the least active parts of the learning.  We had amazing talks by Chris Jernstedt on the brain and learn, Josh Compton on effective presentation styles, and Malcolm Brown on the same topic.  These talks did incorporate some active elements as they had lots of give-and-take with our ALI group, but they were still basically lectures.  My background over the past years has been so much based on online learning that I tend to discount the power of quality teaching presentations.  This was a good counter-balancing experience.

3) ALI holds two powerful core messages for me.  Both of these messages were articulated by Karen Gocsik, and I am grateful to her for all she has taught in the short time I've known Karen.  Lesson 1 is that active learning requires active engagement.  No surprise here.  Karen and Tom are masters at modeling these techniques.  Lesson 2 is that for our classes to be built around active learning it is necessary for us to give up some control and to re-evalute our idea as the expert and master of our discipline.  We need to consciously make space where the students can create, learn from each other, teach us, control what they learn and how they learn, and claim their own authority and autonomy in our classes.  

4)  My final thought is a reflection on how fortunate I feel to work at Dartmouth with such passionate, smart, caring, motivated and engaged colleagues. 

we need our own song

google docs new site for college students

Google launched a new site today to help college students figure out the best ways to use Google Docs.

As with many folks I often wonder why Google doesn't take the next steps and put out a cloud based CMS?

Some of the suggestions on the site make a good deal of sense:

These include:

• "Brainstorm notes for group projects - With a record of everyone's thoughts in one place, no good idea gets left behind."
• "Need surveys for classes? - Send out a form to your email lists and get an organized spreadsheet of responses instantly."
• "Use forms for your student group or dorm - Collect RSVPs, organize your budget, or take collaborative meeting minutes."

How wonderful it would be if these tasks could be seamlessly embedded into the course design and learning experience.

prediction about slideshare and google

Slideshare just announced the ability to import Google Docs directly into their service.

I tried it out and it works pretty nicely.

My prediction for the day is that Google will purchase Slideshare.

The two sites are a natural fit.  The Google Presentation tool in Google docs never really took off.   The tool is okay, but what is lacking is a community around the the presentations.

Slideshare has a vibrant community.  It has established itself as the destination for presentations.   A Google Slideshare makes sense, as the service could take advantage of Google's technical expertise and scale.

The big thing that is missing from either Slideshare or Google Presentations is the easy ability to do voice-over presentations.  This capability should be fairly easy to implement, particularly given Google's experience with YouTube in allows webcam/audio capture and upload in the browser.  A dead simple voice-over recording and sharing tool for online presentations would dramatically expand the utility of the service.  

Easily allowing the presentations to be published on Google Slideshare or YouTube would provide a superb platform for sharing the material.

what I learned from being off-the-grid

Just got back from a week off-the-grid at the wonderful AMC Echo Lake family camp in Acadia National Park. 

A full week of hiking, swimming, biking, reading, eating, relaxing and conversation sans any news, technology, email or communication.  Within the space of a week the families staying at AMC's Echo Lake created a supportive and intimate community.  Where else within a span of a couple of days could you have folks who were previously strangers watching your kids at the waterfront while you snoozed on the dock?

What did I learn about learning technology in this week-off-the-grid?

I learned that:

A)  People are really interested in innovations in teaching and learning in the higher-ed-world.

B)  That folks have an intuitive grasp of the power of technology to catalyze change and to facilitate authentic learning.

Part of the bonding experience at Echo Lake is telling out stories.  Turns out that folks beyond higher ed. have fascinating jobs and amazing backgrounds.  No job seems to be very much like it was 15, 10 or even 5 years ago.  Everyone is constantly re-inventing themselves and expressing their creativity through work.

The story I would tell about my job is that what we are about is using working with faculty to have big classes feel and act like small classes, and it is the pairing of technology and learning theory that allows us to accomplish this goal.  Universally everyone I spoke with believed that we needed to move beyond a straight lecture, information scarcity model of teaching and learning - and towards something more like a seminar or a studio where students create.  The older folks at Echo Lake were just as excited about how technology could change higher education as the high students I chatted with.  Everyone wanted to know more, and everyone had stories and ideas about how college teaching could be improved.

So I learned this week that we do have a story to tell.  And if we think about how we tell our stories, and do so in simple and accessible ways, that we can get people excited about the work we do. 

How do you tell our story?

latest ways that our students are teaching us some sociology

Today we told the students that an important way to measure the success of their work is the extent to which they can get their creation out into the public discussion.  This means views, comments, debates, discussions.  

I'm not sure how to either teach or motivate students how to get their work in wide circulation.  The first hurdle is to convince them of the value in getting their work shared.  Once they are "believers" then I have to believe that they will be more creative then we could ever be in getting their work viewed and commented upon.

Any thoughts?

Here is the latest batch of sociology teaching materials:

why doesn't Amazon show any love to it's child Audible?

The picture to the left shows a book on Amazon that is not available as a Kindle download.

Amazon thoughtfully provides a link that allows us to send a message to the books publisher asking that it be made available as a Kindle e-book.

So why doesn't Amazon provide the same option to tell the publisher that we'd like the book as an audiobook?   

This is just one area where I remain completely confused and frustrated with how Amazon has (failed) to integrate Audible.

Back in 2008 when Amazon purchased Audible (for $300 million) I was hopeful that this would mean some major improvements on the Audible side. To date, these improvements have been slow in coming.

The situation:

• Do not have any integration of Audible and Amazon accounts.

• We can't put Audible books on our Amazon Wish List.

• The audible.com recommendation engine remains terrible compared to Amazon's.

• In fact, the whole Audible site is suffers greatly compared to Amazon.com.   It is slow, poorly designed to find new books, barely personalized, and basically difficult to navigate.

Amazon is missing a real opportunity to tap into a dedicated group of people who are big Amazon spenders and Audible subscribers.  We are passionate about our audio books and would be natural early adopters for e-books if Amazon found a way to bundle the services.  We would buy many more audio books if we could have an audiobook store on Amazon with all its recommendation, site design, navigation and community goodness.

And yes....we want a way to tell the publisher that we want an audio version!

modeling teaching techniques - the short online voice-over presentation

Lanny Arvan (beloved LTL faculty) posted a great voice-over presentation on effective teaching/presentation techniques for faculty using Slideshare and Audacity.

I like this presentation on two levels:

Level 1 - Modeling the Method:  The idea of using simple Web 2.0 authoring and publishing platform tools to produce and disseminate the materials provides a wonderful model for both faculty and student learners.  Any instructor or student could adopt these tools to produce and share materials. 

Level 2 - Content of the Presentation:  Lanny's 7 minute presentation is a great summary of core ideas for effective teaching presentations.  The content includes links to other materials that the viewer can go and look at if interest and time allows. At 7 minutes we can listen to the presentation in-between other tasks......it is short enough that we can actually make the time while dense enough that this time is well spent.

Where I'd push Lanny is to move his audience away from solely faculty, and to recognize that students authoring and sharing content will and should be the greatest producers of new knowledge.  SlideShare is one excellent publishing platform - I tend to favor YouTube as it has such a wide reach.  The other area I'd push Lanny is to recognize the value of free Web 2.0 authoring tools - but to also recognize that these tools have limitations.  For instance, I find needing to use Audacity with Slideshare to produce voice-over presentations to be cumbersome.  I don't think that this method passes the "wicked easy" test for faculty and students, and therefore is less likely to be adopted.

Can we offer our learning communities rapid authoring tools that can be disseminated out for all users?  We are looking at Techsmith's Camtasia Relay as a possible low-cost, cross-platform authoring tool.  The content can easily be published up to YouTube - taking care of the publishing platform (or shared as a link within the CMS).  What are you looking at?

Classroom Presentation Ideas (2)

View more presentations from lannyd.

student video presentations on Lareau's Unequal Childhoods

Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University Maryland, proved to be a wonderful choice for our Introduction to Sociology class.

The students did an amazing job of teaching the key concepts of the book.  This is the third 5 minute video that they have made, and each time we are amazed by the quality of their work.

For these student videos we experimented with giving feedback using the quick video response feature on YouTube - a tool that lets us use our Webcams and headphones to provide critiques and feedback that the student teams (and all the students) can view.   This is quick, personal and direct way to provide student feedback.

Reflections on The EDUCAUSE Institute Learning Technology Leadership Program (LTL) 09

  

The LTL Faculty:  http://net.educause.edu/Faculty/1021718

Had a couple of weeks to cogitate on LTL 09.  The Institute is so intense that it has taken me this long to process.

The ROI:  LTL was the most valuable professional development work that I've participated in during my 15 years in academia and 10 years in educational technology.  I highly recommend the program to colleagues in learning technology who are interested in moving towards and expanding their leadership roles on campus.  Investments in time and expense for attending LTL are paid many times over in the deep learning, reflections, networks, and perspective gained. 

The Skills:  Anyone who is actively involved in our discipline and campus life knows how important it is to align our communication strategies and content with strategic campus priorities.  However, what I learned from the experience is how difficult it is to put this knowledge into action.   The practical and hard-earned experience that LTL gives its participants in "Making the Case" (a strategic 15 minute team presentation to LTL faculty playing leadership roles such as CFO, Provost, CIO, Dean of Faculty etc.) is invaluable.  After LTL, I will approach strategic communications opportunities with campus decision makers in different ways as a result of the program.  This knowledge, I believe, cannot be gained through thinking about, discussing or reading about high stakes strategic communication.  It is necessary to practice these techniques, in a safe environment, with firm guidance and enough time and resources to improve on one's method.  

The People:.  Beyond the curriculum (lectures, discussions and exercises) the true ROI from LTL comes from the opportunity to spend concentrated and significant time with the LTL faculty and fellow participants.  The faculty are truly extraordinary in every sense of the word.     Each of the six faculty members demonstrate the very best characteristics of leadership in both their professional achievements and their personal conduct.  LTL provides an opportunity to engage in deep and probing discussions with leaders in our discipline.  Here the genius of the Institute's organization is revealed, as many of these discussions take place during the shared meals and get-togethers built into the schedule.  Normally I would use non-conference session time to catch-up on e-mail, run outside, or relax in my hotel room (a behavior that I think is shared by many people in our discipline - we tend to value or quiet and private time).  At LTL, the faculty and the the structure requires engagement and dialogue.  

Our Discipline:  My final takeaway from LTL is that I believe the Institute provides a front-row seat at the emergence of the academic discipline of learning technology.  The Institute highlighted the degree to which the participants share a common theoretical framework (active learning and constructivism), speak the same technical language, use similar tools, read similar journals and participate in similar social media, face recognizable struggles, and identify with the discipline.  While learning technologists come from diverse academic backgrounds we seem to be forming into a cohesive and purpose-driven professional discipline.   Understand one's place within a larger structure and connecting with leaders and colleagues who share values, goals, and methods is a sustaining gift.  

in defense of (my) lectures

Hello, my name is Josh, and I'm a lecturer.

(And then everyone responds...."Hi Josh").

We don't really like lectures in teaching unless they are our lectures.  Then they are great.  

We talk (blather?) endlessly about "active learning" and moving from students absorbing to creating. How can we reconcile the lecture to our faith?

The slideshare below is today's lecture on "The Family" (a small topic).

Yes...I protest too much.  We do say lectures are great if they are given within a framework that asks the students to engage and create.  My simple rules for lecturing include:

• Keep it short as possible....30 minutes total for me is pushing it.
• Keep it chunked....10 minute segments with an emotional reset for the audience (see Medina on Death by PowerPoint)
• Keep it visual...(words are okay...just not too many words)
• Keep it interactive.  For social science, I like to show graphs with trends.  I think ask the students to tell the class what the "big thing" they can pull out of each slide - the big story.   (And try to push a variety of people to talk).   
• Keep it early.  I always do my lecture in the beginning of class when I have the most energy, leaving time at the end for course logistics, exercises, questions, issues etc. 
• Keep it relevant.  The material must be brought around to relate to your students experience....with prompts during the lecture to get them to talk about their experience in relation to the lecture material. 
• Keep it personal.  Our brains love stories about people.  We love to tell and love to listen.  Connect personal stories with the big (sociological or whatever discipline) trends you are trying to burn into their brains. 
• Keep it fast and high energy.  Putting up the slides in Blackboard frees the students from too much note taking.....the point is to get across some big things that you want them to take away with them.  Focus on those big things with lots of enthusiasm, using voice and visuals as a value add to the curriculum they consume.  

What are your "keep's?" 

Enjoy the lecture slide deck.  You will be tested on this material.

Lecture On The Family

View more presentations from Joshua Kim.

thoughts on multiple choice exams and Blackboard

Today we gave the midterm for the Soc. 1 class that Susan and I are teaching. 

Multiple choice tests have gotten somewhat of a bad name in higher education, a development that I think is unfortunate and counterproductive.  Done with some care I think that multiple choice can be an excellent tool to aid learning.  Blackboard, when combined with test banks offered by publishers in conjunctions with texts, can facilitate student learning and the transfer of curriculum into long-term memory.

Here are the ingredients:

1.  Load the testbanks or written multiple choice questions into Blackboard pools.

2.   Have weekly quizzes on each chapter drawn from the pools.  Allow students to take practice quizzes each week as many times as they like drawn from these pools.  Have the graded quizzes pull from the same question pools as the practice quizzes.  Encourage open book and student team collaboration for the quizzes.   Make sure that lecture and class material connects with the quizzes.   The principle is frequent, low-stakes assessment done close in time to when students work with the curriculum.

3.  For the midterm pull the same questions from the questions pools used for the weekly quizzes.  As with the quizzes, create a practice midterm test that matches the number of questions for the graded midterm.  For quizzes I have 20 questions, midterm is 50.  We covered chapters 1 to 7 so far, with all these chapters represented on the midterm.  

4.  The midterm is given through Blackboard during class period.  The test is open book, but not open note.  The goal is to get the students to spend some quality time with their textbooks and thinking about the curriculum.  Since students should have been working with the questions and answers all along, and have had the opportunity to see all the questions during their practice sessions, then the midterm should be less stressful.

5.  The emphasis is on learning, not on the tests to diagnose that learning.  Be clear that multiple choice tests largely test test taking ability.  But...the conditions can be set-up so that any student that diligently prepares and attends to preparation should do well without too much stress.  A good experience with the test will reinforce positive feelings towards the subject matter.

6.  Repeat process for the rest of the semester quizzes and the non-cumulative final exam.

The students may give some pushback in that these conditions should allow everyone to succeed.  Students, particularly students at competitive institutions, will equate the value of an assessment to the differentiation in grading.  In other words, they will value assessments and assignments more where a scarcity of top grades exist.  For an exam format such as described above the students will be uncomfortable with anything less then perfect grades.  This is a "teachable moment" - a chance to talk about your learning philosophy and if you believe that good grades are scarce (grading on a distribution) or if the conditions can be set-up for more widespread higher grades.

Ideally, quizzes and exams should not be the grade differentiator.  Students that demonstrate strong leadership in the course, who stand out in terms of helping the class and their fellow learners succeed, and who demonstrate consistently high quality work in projects should get the highest grades.  Exams are a good place for learning, a good place to get students to spend time with the curriculum, but a poor method to differentiate on grades.

Time for a new university?

Just came across this video for a commercial by Kaplan and found it quite thought provoking. I wonder if they are delivering on their message? What are your thoughts? Is it time for universities to change more drastically?

Blackboard loses appeal. Open source competitors exhale.

You have probably heard by now that Blackboard has lost its appeal against Desire2Learn for patent infringement. Reading through the decision, the judge is pretty clear not only about affirming the original dismissal of the first 35 of Blackboard's arguments, but also determining that the final 3 relied substantially upon earlier points, leaving Bb with not a single leg of its argument to stand on.

Not only is this good news for Desire2Learn but it also helps to secure a "happy place" for open source LMS to continue their development without fear of some lawsuit in the future. It will be interesting to see what Bb's next move will be.

Bloom's Taxonomy: Now In Wheel Form for Smoother Syllabus Rolling!

This is not entirely new, though the blog posting I came across is. The July 25, 2009 entry on the ZaidLearn site entitled "Use Bloom's Taxonomy Wheel for Writing Learning Outcomes" collects three wheel-based representations of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy to use as reference when drawing up activities for students. One is shown below.

the challenge of grading creative work

The playlist embedded below contains my student presentations on deviance and social control.  This is the first graded team sociological presentation of the semester.  They will complete five of these presentations this term, all designed to teach a core sociological concept from the curriculum. 

The thinking behind having student teams create and publish these presentations aligns with constructivist and active learning theory.  By engaging the curriculum in a manner that is meaningful to their lives, by teaching the material, and by sharing with peers then we are setting up conditions for significant and authentic learning.

I hope you enjoy the videos - I think the students are doing amazing work.

Grading becomes a serious challenge when we set-up our courses around students completing and sharing their creative work.  The goal is to have students step-out of their comfort zones and be willing to explore new ideas and methods for communicating their thinking.  Grading encourages students to play it safe, to produce work that has resulted in good grades for them in the past.  To produce work that they think conforms to what the professor wants, rather then that plays to their strengths, passions and curiosity.

I've tried to address this challenge by instituting peer grading (as a portion of the feedback), as well as to simply engage the students in a discussion about the uses and misuses of grading.  We've talked about how grades are meant to incent students to work harder, and tried to figure out why grades often act as disincentives to creative and brave work.  

I don't have an answer to this challenge besides to be willing to take class time and energy to discuss grades.  We can try to help students navigate grades by providing rubrics, peer grading, and extensive written feedback.  

However, it should be acknowledged that for many subjects and courses (including sociology courses) grading is something that most often we need to work against and overcome.  We would be much better off with a grading scheme that put less weight and pressure on grades - perhaps distinguishing only between a "high pass" (which would be reserved to only 20% of the students) - a "pass: (for students who were engaged and did the work) and an "unsatisfactory".  

Perhaps this is how the "A", "B", "C" grade was originally set-up - but the reality is that at institutions such as the one I teach students see anything less then an "A" grade as a major problem and a failure.  They got into college getting "A"s, they know how to get "A's" - and any class that sets things up differently where an "A" is not the standard grade is a class that they will not be happy with.

Since I've been teaching around creative team projects - working to play to my student's strengths - I've found that my average grades for the semester have gone up.  I end up giving more "A's" - as I want to find a way to reward and encourage students creativity and passions.

We need to address and deal with the mismatch of our traditional methods of giving final grades and 

our new thinking on setting our classes up for authentic learning.

open learning is the new active learning

David Wiley writes about the benefits of open teaching in an article for the Chronicle's Wired Campus.

Wiley recounts his experience having his students post their assignments in open blogs.  He writes: 

"By changing their homework assignments from disposable, private conversations between them and me (the way printed or e-mailed assignments work in students’ minds) into public, online statements that became part of a continuing conversation, we realized very real benefits".

From there he moved to putting his syllabus and course materials on open platforms, drawing curriculum only from open sources, to finally inviting non-matriculated learners into his course environment.

I'm not sure we need to go so far as to have non-students participate in discussions (as our time to read and interact with paying students is precious), but I do believe that learning is amplified by openness.  At the very least we should find ways to make our course designs and material as open as possible.  Using publicly available curriculum is a great way to bring this about.

Whenever and wherever possible students should have the choice and option to publish their work to platforms that are both publicly accessible and will have a life after the course.  What we want is for the students to continue creating and publishing once the course is done.

The argument about active learning seems largely over.  We have reached a point of consensus about the efficacy of active learning, and the gap between the traditional lecture (knowledge is scarce format) and authentic learning.  I'm betting that the next conceptual (and technological) shifts will be around openness. 

the problem with Project Tuva

To quote Wikipedia:

"Project Tuva is a venture between Microsoft Research and Bill Gates designed to teach people about the "core scientific concepts" using interactive media. At its inception, it included the Richard Feynman The Messenger Lectures on video, with expert commentary. Gates saw the lectures when he was younger, and he enjoyed learning about these concepts, and hoped to make them available to others. He also hopes that this will help encourage others to make other educational content available for free."   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Tuva

I went and checked out the first Feynman lecture, and look forward to some day finding the time to listen in full.  

The lectures are delivered in Silverlight, and are presented with a presentation layer that includes searching of the transcript (with jumping to place in the video matching the search term), and extras such as contextual photos and information.

Where I'm concerned that the Project Tuva vision falls short is that the videos seem to be stuck within the player.  I could not find a way to link the video, or grab short chunks of the videos so that I could mashup and re-publish the content.

We've been debating on campus the future of lecture capture.  Some very smart folks (not me) have made the argument for separating capture from presentation.  The Project Tuva experience tends to support this view.  It seems that lectures are valuable only when we can do something active with them, when we can grab parts, mashup up, and re-publish.   

For all the wonderfulness of Gates and Microsoft Research securing the rights to the lectures and putting them out for the world to see I'm afraid this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the learning process.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and the Project Tuva player will allow active learning.  Or maybe they will be moving in this direction.  I certainly hope this will be the case.

I also hope that we don't make the same mistake with how we choose to share our lectures, and build the system from the ground-up to allow active learning through mashing, remixing and publishing.