CC blog

Alternative Scholarly Recognition

Adapt or perish. 

Here we have a blog posting about The University of Maine's New Media Department actually drawing up a set of standards defining alternative forms of scholarly recognition. It may only be one department of one university, but it seems like a move in the right direction. Why are those at the forefront of intellectual thought in our country (college and university faculty nationwide) so often the slowest to recognize and adapt to a changing world?

Having just finished reading Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price, it occurs to me that in the current tenure and promotion system, faculty are being evaluated almost exclusively for their atomic contributions (books and printed journals) rather than their bit (digital) contributions. And yet there is a dichotomy between this contribution to a scarce resource environment (again, the printed word, in journals and books that may reach a very small audience) and the opportunity to contribute to the abundant marketplace of ideas. Anderson writes about the value of "reputation" in the digital world. Doesn't it make more sense, in terms of academic "reputation," for faculty members and their ideas to be put forth in the larger marketplace and to be truly tested and evaluated not just by a small subset of one's academic peers but by a much larger body? Or, is that the ugly truth of elitism in academia?

I'm reminded of a professor in Japan whose paper I was asked to edit. He was publishing in English and there was a particular short phrase that he was using that was clearly incorrect. When I (and another American colleague) pointed out this error to him, he said that he understood the error but that he couldn't change it. When we pressed him for a reason, he replied that the phrase was coined by a senior colleague in the field at a more prestigious Japanese university. He could not "correct" the phrase without appearing to insult the other professor publicly. 

Most U.S. professors with whom I've shared this story find it hard to believe and are confident that the U.S. system is not that way, and wouldn't tolerate such deference in the face of such a clear error. And yet, when I hear faculty say, "Yes, I know, but I can't change the [tenure and promotion] system. That's the way it always has been," it really is not all that different--a ritualized process is flawed and needs to be re-evaluated and adapted as necessary.

So, kudos to the faculty of the New Media Department at The University of Maine for having the courage to change!

budget cuts and big courses

"Class size is expected to increase 10 percent to 20 percent next year, while faculty and staff is expected to decline by at least 10 percent over the next five years."

"At the Santa Cruz campus, most general-education courses with fewer than 100 students enrolled have been canceled..."

from NYT's  University of California Makes Cuts After Reduction in State Financing

My big conclusion about education is that it does not easily scale.  The quality of learning is inversely related to the size of the class.  Putting learners around a seminar table, taking turns presenting material and leading discussions, is the method with the best chance to return authentic and significant learning.

This is the model that was followed in my graduate education.  This is also the model that my wife enjoyed at Exeter and their famous Harkness philosophy.

Educational technology is all about the effort to have big classes feel and act like small classes.  We try to use a combination of teaching methods and technologies to bring all the good things inherent in a seminar model to a class with larger enrollment.  These attributes center include students as creators, collaborators and sharers of knowledge.  In practice, this means moving beyond a "lecture only" to a "lecture plus" methodology - one in which classes leverage course management systems, Web 2.0 authoring tools, rich media and project based learning.

If large classes (which I mean over 30 students) and learning are to coexist then courses require significant inputs.  These inputs could include pairing professors (subject matter experts) with experts in learning design, media, technology, or research.  Inputs also include faculty training, support, and mentoring.  Investments in learning technologies for students and faculty are another form of inputs.  

What institutions cannot do is increase class size without providing these inputs and then expect that students will have authentic and relevant learning experiences.  Courses may be taken, lectures may be given, grades may be dispensed, and degrees conferred - but the gap between learning and education will only grow.

This is why the article in todays NYT's "University of California Makes Cuts After Reduction in State Financing" is so disturbing.  America's system of post-secondary education has long been one of our crown jewels and the envy of the world.  The budget crisis has put this advantage in jeopardy.  

As classes get bigger at public institutions I wonder if the increase in class size is being balanced by the addition of other inputs.  I wonder if we know enough about how to create active learning in large courses.  And I think about how difficult it is to dislodge traditions of lecture based, faculty-centric, information scarcity models of learning.  

The challenge of bringing seminar learning to big courses, in an era of constrained resources, is the major challenge of our discipline.  This is the challenge that I hope Educause, our professional organization, will choose to focus on over then next few years.

students as creators

We had our first student team voice-over sociological teaching presentations in class today.  Six times this semester the students will produce a <=5 minute presentation designed to teach a sociological concept or issue. 

The presentations are designed to teach the materials in a way that would be of interest and relevance to a high school senior or college freshman.  As you can see from the embedded playlist below, all the videos will be publicly available on YouTube.

The videos were produced with Jing, with one group using iMovie.

Some lessons learned from this first assignment:

• Each student group was able to produce competent work without having any prior experience with the tools or format.

• Throwing students into the "deep end" of having to create teaching materials (and publish them to the world) will initially freak them out, but if you set up a "safe" and supportive learning environment they will surprise you in the quality of materials they can produce very quickly.

• We need some research on the efficacy for long-term and deep learning for these methods.  It feels as if students were engaging in significant active learning in the process of absorbing the curricular materials in order to teach them in an engaging way.

• This experience, where students could create I think really good teaching materials, re-doubles my belief that we need to get authoring and publishing tools into the hands of students as well as faculty - and that over time largest utilization of these tools will be from students.

• Colleges and Universities have an opportunity to share student produced material with the world and should figure out how to promote student work just as some institutions are sharing lectures and courses.

Tweeting in the back row

I came across this article today, which speaks to a number of the topics we have discussed in various conversations this year. The article is "College professors find Twitter a useful educational tool" from the Wichita Eagle newspaper. In typical "news" style, the article does not go into much depth, but there are a couple of lines that will ring familiar to many of us.

Others say experimentation with Twitter is the latest sign of a real shift in education, away from a professor lecturing students to a more democratic and wide-ranging exchange of information.
...
That means, of course, that students can also tweet from class, potentially broadcasting a professor's comments across the globe.

"It's something I've learned to accept, but it's hard," said David Kamerer of Wichita, assistant professor of public relations and new media at Loyola University Chicago.

"They might be IM'ing or on Twitter, commenting on the lecture, and I have no way of knowing," he said. "It's a little unnerving, but slowly it has become an accepted part of academia."

The other concern raised is about student attention.

In a perfect world, I'm sure that lecturing professors would prefer to have 100% of student attention.* But since we do not live in a perfect world, which is more preferable to this same lecturing professor--to have students falling asleep in the back row or to have students engaged enough to "tweet out" the salient points of the lecture and/or to find and broadcast information related to topic being presented?

A couple of years ago, I assisted a team-taught course that discussed related issues in three national cultures. The faculty members prepared their lecture notes and the links and visual materials to support the lectures, which they put up in Blackboard, but invariably questions or topics would arise in class (from students and professors) that were outside of the prepared materials. That's where I came in. 

Officially, I was in the class to ensure technology worked, to add my comments (since my field overlapped), and to help "control" the Blackboard links and visuals. What I ended up doing, though, was more interesting. I was actively Googling things that would come up and, when appropriate, signal the professor. My search results could then be shown to the class. It worked beautifully, and allowed for a much richer classroom experience. Unfortunately, it was definitely not scaleable campus-wide. There was only one of me, after all. Nor was it reasonable to expect that a professor would want to actively derail the conversation in order to perform Internet searches constantly during the class. The hemming and hawing during a search at the podium is uncomfortable and a time waster, and student attention will wander. This is where I see opportunity for tools like Twitter.

For students who are comfortable multi-tasking, the tweets in the back channel can provide an enhanced conversation, links to related content, and feedback on the course. If the Twitter-stream is docked somewhere on the instructor's station in the room, then particularly interesting or useful tweets can then be brought to the foreground of the class discussion for comment and analysis. 

Contrast that with the value of the notebook doodles of bored students or the dreams of the dozers! I think I'd prefer the tweets.

*Of course, in a perfect world, many of us would probably prefer not to have professors who merely lecture, either.

teaching nirvana

I've seen the promised land - and it is when students (unasked) make teaching screencasts for other students. 

The video below was put in our Blackboard Course Blog by our student Eric.  It shows how to embed a YouTube video in a Blackboard blog (or Wiki).   Eric used Jing to make the screencast.  Jing is the tool that the students are using in groups to make 6 teaching voice-over presentations on sociological concepts.

One of the assignments for the students throughout the semester is to find short Web videos that are relevant to the curriculum that we are covering and post them on Blackboard (with a note about why the video relates to a specific sociological topic or concept).

Having students turn themselves into educators, and having students independently take pro-active leadership steps, should be one of the explicit goals of our courses and programs. 

How can we facilitate and encourage more behavior like what Eric demonstrated in this work?

short web videos and the lecture

We showed this video in our sociology class this morning.  The video was part of a quick lecture on social structure.

The video worked great for a number of reasons:

• The video demonstrates one example of a sociological argument, namely the connection between large historical structural forces (population size, disease) and individual life chances.

• We are having our students (in groups) produce teaching 5 minute voice over presentations (which they will present in class and post to YouTube).  The video demonstrates a great example of this format, as the presenter makes an argument and uses good visuals, pacing and passion (all supported by evidence).

• The video is short (3:50) so it holds the students attention, can be put at the moment where their attention is starting to wonder in the lecture (about 10 minutes) and re-sets their brains for the next point.

The growth of web video such as TED talks, Google Talks, and materials on YouTube is a wonderful opportunity to introduce high quality learning materials into the lecture environment.  Incorporating brief videos makes delivering the lecture both more enjoyable and effective. 

The biggest challenge, as I see it, is figuring out how to match the available high quality Web videos with the curriculum being taught in our classes.

As far as I know there is no easy way to search for good video against the standard teaching terms, concepts etc.  Actually, we can search, but we get back far too many hits and the results are not usable.

I knew about this TED talk because I had seen it.....but I can only see so much.  We need a system to match this new Web 2.0 media curriculum to courses and instructors.

Ideas?  A curricular content management system?  A blog that tracks relevant videos by discipline?  A wiki that does the same?  A vertical search engine with good tagging? 

a team approach to course design and teaching

The embedded video (below) shows Susan Simon talking through the semester long sociological video mashup project that she is running. 

Students will create a video mashup, and publish them on YouTube, that teaches a core concept covered in the course.  The sources for the mashup is primarily the 6 documentaries they watch as part of the curriculum, although they can use a small percentage of an outside movie as well as images.  The idea is that students will learn the concepts by teaching the concepts.  They will be creators and educators, working in a narrative visual medium, and their audience will be all learners on the Net.

Introducing a semester long video mashup project to a large introductory course requires inputs from learning professionals beyond the capacities of any one instructor.  Indeed, any effort to transcend the limitations of large courses to create the active learning opportunities of small courses requires additional inputs and investments in the course design and teaching process. 

It is all well and good for an institution to claim that it "cares about high quality teaching".  This claim, however, can only be made good on if the institution is willing to invest in allocating the time of learning professionals to the level of the course.

A team approach to course design, development and teaching mirrors the trend in specialized medicine.  My wife, a pediatric oncologist, works as a member of a "care team", with each team member having specific and essential roles in each child's treatment plan.  As with medicine, the components of developing and teaching a course have become too complicated and demanding for any one person to effectively handle alone.  A team approach allows specialists in a number of areas to come together to create and manage the learning experience. 

This team approach could be with a learning technologist and media specialist (such as Susan), or with a subject specialist librarian, a learning designer, a rich media specialist, a technologist, or perhaps all of the above.  These professionals complement the knowledge and skills of the instructor who has the responsibility of subject matter specialist. 

This does not mean that responsibility is equally distributed or that each member of the team spends equal time.  The professor will still retain retain ultimate responsibility for the course, and will devote the most time.  However, in a team course development/teaching context the time and energy of the instructor is devoted to her expertise (the course subject matter), as she is freed from having to gain fluency in the methods and technologies that constitute her team's skills. 

I would have never been able to have a sociological video mashup project in the Soc. 1 course without Susan as I have neither been trained in this narrative format nor do I have experience making mashups.  I know that this skill is important, I believe that learning this skill is essential, and I think our students will best learn the key concepts of sociology by working with our curriculum to make this mashup.  But I don't have these skills, so unless I partnered with an expert the students would not be able to have this experience.

We also should recognize that allocating time among academic technologists, librarians or other learning professionals to partner with faculty on course design, development and teaching also accrues advantages for the range of consulting, supporting and faculty development work that we do. 

Putting the methods, theories and tools in practice in an actual course does a wonderful job of exposing weaknesses and illuminating best practices.  Seeing up close and personal the pain points of instructors helps us research and support technologies and methods that are most beneficial to the faculty members (and therefore will be most likely to be utilized).  Having to use CMS and Web 2.0 tools in an actual teaching context is the best way to learn these tools - knowledge that can then filter down into workshops and one-on-one consulting.

How can we scale a team approach to course design, development and teaching:

1.   Model courses that have used this approach in campus talks and departmental meetings so the pros and cons can be shared and discussed.

2.   Figure out ways to make team developed and/or taught courses visible to faculty who may be interested to try to this approach.

3.   Bring together academic departments, academic technology units, and library units to discuss large classes and co-discover where pairing faculty with other learning professionals may be beneficial at the course design and/or instruction work.

What are the limitations of this approach?  How many courses could a "team" approach scale up to?  If a learning technologist or librarian is doing this work what work is not getting done (opportunity costs)?  How can we bring groups together from the departments, academic technology and the library to discuss these goals and challenges?

replacing the CMS with blogs?

From the Chronicle:  "Colleges Consider Using Blogs Instead of Blackboard"
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i38/38blogcms.htm

Seems to me that this is a proverbial baby with bathwater story.

The Chronicle links to an interesting example at CUNY's Baruch College - Art 3059, Designing with Computer Animation - showing how a course could be run from a blog.

I hope that Blackboard does not dismiss this discussion as coming from the fringe. The storm clouds for Blackboard are real.  Unless Blackboard gets serious about integrating with consumer based Web 2.0 tools, rather then trying either keep users inside the system or only partially integrate with outside tools, then the value proposition of the service will continue to diminish.

At the same time, I believe that the anti-CMS, anti-Blackboard "movement" gets some fundamentals wrong.  The cost of Blackboard still seems like a relative bargain for rock-solid SIS integration, a robust grade center and a feature rich assessment engine.  These services are difficult to get right, and I don't believe they lend themselves to the business models that drive Web 2.0 tools (whether or not community source CMS's will mature enough to supplant commercial CMS's is an open question). 

The long term viability of Blackboard rests on their ability to move from a product company to a service provider.  Services will include a cloud based delivery model of core CMS functions and managing the integration between critical campus apps (such as the SIS), the CMS and consumer Web 2.0 tools. 

Blackboard's products will inevitably move away from collaboration and communication applications towards the less glamorous (but essential) middleware necessary to tie together the disparate ecosystem of learning and institutional tools.

We have reached an inflection point in thinking about learning and teaching where the drive is to expose the learning process and outcomes to the world.  Course content and student worked locked up behind authentication in proprietary systems matches an exhausted faculty-centric mode of constructing and delivering education.  Active learning and student-centered models push us towards open platforms and tools that students will utilize for a lifetime of learning.

The current options, however, put us at a poor in-between place - wanting to use open, public, and agile Web 2.0 tools but dealing with poor integration and steep learning curves. 

An illustrative example would be using YouTube to publish student work such as voice-over presentations and course media (mashup) projects.  Leaving aside the inability to have single sign-on, YouTube does not allow a course channel to be created that easily allows all students to upload their content while restricting rights to delete other students content.  The result is that the professor must either upload all the content, or place existing content (from the students account) into a playlist. 

Blackboard could invest in  deals with Google (YouTube) that could couple the two services, sharing subscription and advertising revenue.  Similar arrangements could be imagined between Blackboard and providers of blogs, online file storage, image databases, survey tools, and social networks.

Failure to take these steps will, I believe, result in an inevitable erosion of Blackboard as the core learning technology on campus, with loss of customers to (cheaper) community source and consumer platforms to follow.

the new 1 minute essay: or why professors should love laptops in the lecture

A common complaint we hear from faculty is students use of their laptops to surf the Web during lecture classes.

Ubiquitous wireless access paired with everyone owning laptops has introduced the huge potential for distraction to the classroom.

According to a Chronicle first person account some professors have banned laptops from class.  Many advocate the efficacy of reducing the use of technology to reclaim the learning space:

"Despite digital distractions, ever-larger class sizes, decreased budgets, and fewer tenured colleagues, professors still are responsible for turning students on to learning. To do so, we just may have to turn off the technology."

I believe that it is a mistake to see laptops as detrimental to learning.  In my experience laptops are in fact an essential tool for effective teaching and learning. 

Some ideas from how we are using laptops as learning tools from our course this summer:

1)  The 2 minute PowerPoint.  This is analogous to the old 1 minute essays that we wrote in our classes.   

Method:  Break the students into groups if 3 or 4:  Give them a research question from the curriculum that they need to turn into a 2 minute presentation.  Stress that the presentation needs to "teach" a core concept from the curriculum. 

Give the students 15 minutes to research and create the PowerPoint, and then have them publish the files to the Blackboard Course Blog.  Once all the students have published have each group come up to the classroom computer and give their 2 minute presentation.

2) The "instant" voice-over presentation:  This requires that students download the free Jing or have JingPro.  The learning goals are the same as the 2 minute PowerPoint - with the objective of turning students into producers rather then consumers of knowledge. 

Method:  Again give the groups a list of presentation questions/issues based on the weeks reading (it is important to give the groups some choice).  Have them make a PowerPoint and a voice-over presentation - and then publish that presenation to the Course Blog through upload or linking to their uploaded YouTube submission.  When everyone has uploaded the work have the students watch the voice-over presenations from their laptops and put commentary in the Blog.

Extensions:  Once the barrier is crossed from student "consuming" to student "producing" in class then many possibilities start to emerge.  The easy availablity of standard authoring tools combined with ubiquitos wireless means that students can quickly become creators.   The stress is on the process, not the ends, as the process requires students to come to class prepared to "teach" materials and ready to engage in a discussion with other students about the most effective way to present their ideas.

What are your ideas to utilize free and/or easily available tools to turn your students in creators, sharers and teachers during our classroom time?  

What are the downsides to this approach?

integrating Google Moderator with Blackboard

The screenshot above shows how we will be experimenting with integrating Google Moderator into Blackboard and our course this summer.

The idea is that students will be able to ask questions during class during those (rare) times when we are lecturing.  We will have Blackboard and the Google Moderator section projected on the screen, and we will invite the students to both ask questions by jumping in or to type their questions in so we can see them in real time.

We may ask the students a question, and rather then have them answer verbally we will ask them to type their thoughts into Google Moderator.  

The voting feature of Google Moderator should be useful for both use cases, as this function allows everyone in the class to interact and rate the questions (with top rated ones rising to the top).  This voting tools is the main reason to use Google Moderator as oppossed to the Blackboard blog (although I think there is real value in having students experiment with tools that they can take to other settings).

The hope is that this tool will allow more channels of communication and open up feedback mechanisms to those students who may be reluctant to speak out or who organize their thoughts better when writing.

Some other benefits to this system will include the creation of a record of questions and the thinking of the students as the course proceeds.  Having Google Moderator up and going during lecture times will also channel the students desire to type on their laptops into hopefully the productive activity of asking (and voting on) questions.

As with YouTube integration this remains something of a hack.  Students will need their own Google logons (which is conveniently the same as their YouTube logons).  I'm not clear if others outside the class may be able to access this Moderator area (and if that would be a good or bad thing).  We will have to experiment with both the technology and the method of having a real time question system displayed during lecture times.

integrating a course YouTube channel with Blackboard

Tomorrow Susan and I will be teaching a faculty workshop called: ""Course Content on YouTube?! YES, there is!"  Besides showing all the great curricular content available on YouTube we will be talking about some of the ways that YouTube can be used as a platform to publish and share curricular video produced in a course.

The timing is good, as the course that Susan and I will be teaching this summer will make extensive use of YouTube and our course channel http://www.youtube.com/user/introsocdartmouth

Students will submit both their team semester long video-mashup projects and their team voice-over presentations (using Jing) to our course YouTube channel. 

What we are experimenting with here is the integration of our campus central IT learning infrastructure (Blackboard) with a consumer/public Web 2 platform (YouTube).  For more on this see Weller and Alziel "Bridging the Gap Between Web 2.0 and Higher Education" (2009)

Our campus learning infrastructure does not provide us with a platform that meets the following requirements - hence the need to integrate YouTube into the course:

• Easy methods for students to publish videos and voice-over presentations.
• Audience for student produced curricular media content is the larger world.
• Larger world can comment and provide feedback for student produced media content.
• Student produced curricular media content is made explicitly to share with the world in order to add knowledge.
• Students can use the platform to become recognized "experts" in field (over time).
• The content published on the platform has a life outside both the time period of the course and the walls of the classroom.
• The platform is one that students are already engaged in and are motivated to participate in.

Integrating a course YouTube channel with Blackboard is not a perfect solution.  The main problem remains authentication.  YouTube does not seem to allow multiple accounts for 1 channel.  At this point I have not figured out the best way to allow the students to "own" their own channel by having them publish and their materials (without me as a bottleneck) while maintaining some security of published content.

In many ways the screenshot above remains a hack, a workaround, made necessary by the lack of any integration at the building block level between Blackboard and YouTube.  This method would be much easier to diffuse throughout the curriculum if the two platforms were (loosely) tied together with a common authentication model (and maybe dynamic creation of the YouTube channel tied to the course ID and enrollment). 

The other issue will be social and organizational.  How much will the College want to share / highlight the work that the students do in the course on the main Dartmouth YouTube channel?  Can we envision a future where all of student curricular content published to course specific YouTube channel's are aggregated and the best student work is allowed to rise to the top?  Here we have a real opportunity to differentiate ourselves by highlighting student creation of knowledge as opposed to solely faculty created lectures and content.

YouTube / curricular video publishing platform / faculty & student voice-over presentations / JingPro

http://www.youtube.com/user/introsocdartmouth is the channel that we will use this summer students and us teaching folks in Soc. 1 to publish up weekly voice-over presentations and the course video mash-up projects.

I'm asking that the students buy JingPro ($15) - mostly because of the direct upload to YouTube.  This will allow the "teaching sociology" team voice-over presentations to be shared with wider world.

The free Jing outputs *.swf files, which cannot be uploaded to YouTube.

This screencast is my introduction and overview for the class.  It was "rapidly" put together using Jing to grab the images, PowerPoint, and JingPro to record and publish.  Video is then embedded into Blackboard..

Students will be recording (in groups) six of these presentations and linking them (or uploading the *.swf file) to a Blackboard Wiki.  At the end of the course we should have a fair amount of content that teaches the foundational principles of sociology.

Will be interesting to see what technical and pedagogical bumps on the road we hit along the way.

Bloom's digital taxonomy map

http://techlearning.com/article/8670

I'm not sure I agree with all the categorizations....and I think there is room to expand more of the Blackboard tools (Discussions, formative assessments etc.) into this schema - but the map still represents a good starting point.

Agreeing to place our technological methods within a cognitive map helps grounds the work we do in the pedagogy.  We can also aim our tools towards higher levels on the taxonomy, while integrating technology into the larger conversations around learning.

the challenges and opportunities for social media in higher education

http://doteduguru.com/id423-social-media-uses-higher-education-marketing-communication.html

The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education by Rachel Reuben

Bruce M. Saulnier, my old colleague at Quinnipiac University, has a great article out in the June issue of Information Systems Educational Journal entitled "From “Sage on the Stage” to “Guide on the Side” Revisited: (Un)Covering the Content in the Learner-Centered Information Systems Course"

Bruce has long been ahead of the game, educating the rest of us on the value of learner-centric course design and teaching practices. 

I read this article in the context of thinking about how we can use social media tools to complement our CMS platforms.  The advantage of social media tools are that they accomplish many of the goals advocated by Bruce and other progressive educators, that is move the students from consumers to creators and get their work out into the larger conversation. 

As Bruce writes:  "In this community setting learners raise their own questions and generate their own hypotheses, seeking  feedback from their fellow learners, both students and faculty, in testing their hypotheses." (page 5)

The social media I'm thinking about these days are publishing platforms for rich media course assignments.  Video to YouTube is straightforward.   Michael Wilder blogged about how YouTube's Quick Capture tool is a great way for students and faculty to make and share quick video casts. 

Where I'm struggling is how to combine the advantages of a simple voice-over presentation system that students can use with a publishing platform.  At the College we have given a few workshops on TechSmith's free Jing tool - a great way for students to rapidly created voice-over presentations and share them in Blackboard.   In the course I'll be teaching this summer the students will be required to create (in teams) 6 short teaching voice-over presentations on the major sociological themes (using the course reading as the basis for these teaching presentations.

The problem I'm having is that Jing - the free version - does not publish to YouTube.  YouTube does not accept *.swf files. 

The students will be publishing their Jing voice-over presentations to the Blackboard Wiki - the method that we work with faculty to diffuse (and which has had some success).  The problem I have is that the Jing's are then locked up in Blackboard.  We loose the ability to engage in a wider dialogue.  The great work that the students produce will not be available for other learners in other educational settings.   The students will not be able to show-off their work to friends, parents, future employers. 

We could publish to http://screencast.com/ (owned by Techsmith) but this site does not get the network effects (lots of users, lots of sharing and conversation) that YouTube allows.

So I'm feeling sort of stuck.  Any suggestions or ideas?

social curricular reading

 

Two quotes I love from Thompson's Future of Reading in a Digital World Wired column (May 09)

"We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading."

"Every other form of media that's gone digital has been transformed by its audience."

In the course I'm teaching this summer the students will be reading two books:

Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life by Annette Lareau

The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America by Katherine S. Newman

We will have some great discussions of the book, but wouldn't these discussions be much better if they were opened up to other folks reading these books.  I've already moved to planning to publish the students digital video mashup work on a YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/introsocdartmouth  - can the same thing happen with books?

The advantage of open, public platforms for curricular publishing and discussion include:

1. Engaging with the larger conversations.
2. Moving from knowledge consumers to producers.
3. Learning skills to continue engaging in the material once the course is over.
4. Learning to be publicly accountable for your work.
5. Becoming known as an expert on a topic.

Is a site like GoodReads http://www.goodreads.com/  the way to go for curriculum?  Pros?  Risks?

should we be worried about Amazon?

The Google book scanning project has generated a fair amount of worry among academic librarians.

The recent settlement with Google allowing for scanning to go forward has caused additional concerns.  The Chronicle quotes The American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries in a comment to the judge overseeing the settlement with Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers : 

"...many of the features of the settlement, including the absence of competition for the new services, could compromise fundamental library values, including equity of access to information, patron privacy, and intellectual freedom."

I wonder if my academic librarian colleagues are worried about the wrong company.

Is it possible that Amazon has developed a much stronger monopoly position vis-a-vis the books that library patrons (students, faculty, staff) really care about?

The evidence why we should worry about Amazon:

1.  The Kindle Ecosystem:  The Kindle is not a device, but an ecosystem.  It includes (now 2) Kindle readers, the Kindle App (for the iPhone/Touch), and the Kindle store.  Amazon has been brilliant in building this ecosystem, and the seamless connections between these elements is the main reason why nobody buys the (superior) Sony reader. 

I think it is a fantasy to think that devices like forthcoming Plastic Logic reader will displace the Kindle device, as the most likely route is that Amazon will license a Kindle reader to new devices.  As of this writing Amazon has ~275,000 items in the Kindle store.  Amazon's wealth insures that the they have the resources to invest in building this library.  All of this means that Amazon will be as dominant in e-books as Apple is in music downloads.  It will be very difficult for publishers to start their own e-book businesses, as they will lack the e-book ecosystem. 

2. Closed Standards:   The Kindle reader is a closed standard.  Amazon insures that books purchased on its site can only work on a Kindle device.  Given that the Kindle e-book library does and will dwarf all other libraries this means that if you want to read an e-book you will most likely be reading it on a Kindle device.

3.  Audiobooks:   Discussions of digital books often leave out audiobooks.  This is unfortunate, as audibooks are another digital format that offers an alternative to the printed books.  The dominant player in the audiobook industry is Audible.com, and Audible is owned by Amazon (purchased in 2008 for $300 million).  There is every reason to believe that audio and digital books will begin to converge, both with improving text-to-speech software on Kindles, and with integrated delivery that allows Amazon buyers access to either format (and a reader that moves the file along to where the reader left off).   The value proposition of audibooks for time-starved readers is clear, and I think the business will dramatically grow as young people raised on iPods enter their prime book buying age. 

4.  Business Models:  The reason I think that academic librarians (and academics) should be worried about Amazon is that the companies business model does not appear to be friendly to libraries.  As far as I know, Amazon does not allow libraries to license the the digital content (Kindle books and Audible books) to be then "lent out" on a patrons device (my Kindle, my iPod).  Rather, the pilot programs I've seen have from libraries have required that you check out the Kindle device, only being able to read the books pre-loaded on the device.  This is nuts.  I want to have access to the 275,000 books on my Kindle from my library.  Same goes for audiobooks.  It does not appear that Amazon has any program where the library can pay a fee and then have the audiobook available to loan to the users iPod.  Overdrive appears to be the most popular library audibook service, but only offers a very small catalog of books that work on iPods. 

*Note:  Libraries are the biggest buyers of Audibooks....see the Huffington Post on Blue Grass Regional Library in Columbia, Tennessee, that spends $50,000 a year on audiobooks.    The article reports that libraries are 43% of the audibook market, while Amazon/Audible is only 9%.  No data on academic libraries.

The net result of all this is that, today, libraries cannot supply books in the format that more and more people want to read them in (e-book and audio). 

Libraries are great at getting paper books.  If my College library does not have a paper book they will gladly inter-library loan it, having it on my desk in a couple of says.  But I don't want a paper book.  I want an audiobook so I can multitask.  I want an e-book so I can keep it on my Touch and read it when I get a few free moments, or put it on my Kindle so I can jump between books while only carrying one. 

So lots of my money now goes to Amazon to buy the audio and e-books that I can't get from my library.  At their best, libraries turn scarcity into abundance.  When paper books were scarce and expensive the library was essential.  Today, e-books and audiobooks are scarce (expensive) but the library cannot (or does not) provide them.

Libraries should be asking themselves are they in the business of providing their communities "paper books".

I wonder if the energy and worry that libraries have directed towards Google scanning could be re-directed towards Amazon, audio and e-books.  A scanned book by definition becomes more available, but does not foreclose the ability to house or locate the paper copy. 

How will libraries deal with the Amazon monopoly on e-books and audiobooks?  Will libraries try to work with Amazon, to convince the company that it is in its interest to do deals with libraries (increased revenues) and license their content?  Or will libraries invest resources in supporting alternative to the Amazon monopolies?  Will academic libraries be on the front-lines in fighting over-restrictive DRM regimes for e-books and audiobooks to facilitate a reasonable lending model?

The first step towards a solution is recognizing that we have a problem.   As for me, I'm off to Audible to purchase my next book.

why every IHE needs a mobile strategy

We've been debating recently the whole issue of mobile learning.  We've been asking ourselves about the strategic business case for investing in mobilizing our learning platforms, content and services.

In an era of scarce resources and constricted headcounts it makes sense to fully investigate the overall goals of any initiative, and to think about how these goals align with the larger mission.

As an exercise to "get my brain going" (brainstorming) I'd like to offer my own "Top 5" list why every IHE should be thinking about a mobile strategy.

Reason # 1:  Relevancy:   Students, and soon educators, will be increasingly interacting with and consuming content on mobile devices.  This includes video, audio, and text.  The recent 1 billionth download from the Apple App store attests to the fact that mobile devices are becoming primary ways to interact with content.  If we want our learners to engage in educational and curricular material with the same frequency, convenience and emotional connection then we need to provide these educational applications and content to the devices that they already want to use.

Reason #2:  An attention economy.  We don't like to admit this in education, but like everyone else we live in an attention economy.  Students have an ever growing range of options and demands on their time and attention.  Providing curricular materials and applications on platforms that they want to use (and are convenient to access) will increase the opportunities for our students to engage in the educational content that we believe is important and essential.

Reason #3:  Chunks.  Young learners grew up consuming content in small bits, in little chunks.  They do not engage for hours on single tasks.  We may decry this practice as not what we did, but it is the reality (and I have not seen convincing evidence that learners are worse off for this).  Mobile applications and curriculum are conducive to allow students to consume small bits of learning content whenever they can...at moments convenient to them.

Reason #4:  Persistence.   By persistence I mean that a mobile device is almost always with the learner.  They can engage in course content in free moments, (in small chunks), moments that would be lost to other pursuits (say mobile gaming) if curricular applications and content are not available.

Reason #5: Multitasking:  Learners have more commitments and events in a day then hours in a day.  If they are going to spend significant time with curriculum then they will need to multitask.  They will need to listen to a lecture while running on the treadmill, review class notes while riding in the shuttle, take formative assessment quizzes while eating lunch.  Mobile devices, paired with educational apps and mobile content, make this all possible.

I think the risk of not developing a mobile strategy is that we will increase the gap between where we are as educators and where our students are as learners.  If they are spending more time on their mobile devices and we are not there on these devices then we will spend less time together.

The Blackboard monopoly steamrolls on...

First it was WebCT, then it was the patent dispute with Desire2Learn, and now it is Angel.

http://www.blackboard.com/Company/Media-Center/Press-Releases.aspx?releaseid=1285265

How is Blackboard able to avoid investigation for monopolistic practices in the CMS market?

This is disappointing to say the least. Blackboard claimed it would not pursue patent lawsuits against open source products, but how long will that promise hold. To say this is troubling is an understatement, even if Angel were completely willing to be bought out.

good example of using a blog for transparency and communication at Duke's Center for Instructional Technology

http://cit.duke.edu/blog/

The post today reviews Duke's Beta test results for Blackboard 8, providing quotes from students and faculty and linking to resources about the upgrade.

Duke's CIT uses the blog to showcase examples of innovative course design and examples where technology has been leveraged to advance teaching and learning.  Upcoming workshops and training are announced, as well as links to campus events and resources that may be of interest to CIT clients.

In conjunction with the Blog, CIT publishes a monthly newsletter http://cit.duke.edu/news/index.html  - which includes (I'm quoting):

• First notice of funding and grants available from CIT
• Information about all upcoming free CIT events
• Links to useful resources to help faculty use technology effectively in teaching 

wonderful brief article on why web 2 is the future of education - looking for the counter-argument

Wanted....someone who can make a counter-argument to Hargadon:

http://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/03/web-20-is-future-of-education.html

I'll be working my way through the materials that Hargadon links to (particularly the JSB materials), meanwhile I hope you all take a few minutes to read the post.

Would our 10 trends be somewhat different coming from our vantage point? 

(My favorite trend from the post is:  Trend #8: Social Learning Moves Toward Center Stage)

Can we add to this list of "from this to that"?  - which includes my favorites:

* From consuming to producing
* From the lecture to the hallway
* From "access to information" to "access to people"

(Would be interested in your favorites?)

Can we make our own list of the top actions we can take to make shape and support the vision of a new way of constructing and delivering education? 

My favorite idea from Hargadon is:

* Digest This Thought: The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.

Would very much enjoy hearing a counter-argument for why Web 2.0 is not the future of education?  Is it possible that this is not new?  Is this a rehash of what educational reformers throughout the 20th Century have been trying to do (with a new coating of technology frosting?)  Is the argument against the traditional lecture just so many words given the economics of higher education? 

If we can't find the counter-arguments then the initial arguments are probably meaningless.  I worry a bit that the articles, blogs, and videos I consume about changing education seem to all agree with each other.  Hargadon's well-crafted and convincing arguments would be a good place to enter the debate.