wallen's blog

As best I can determine my university has entered into an agreement with a private company to produce and market online programs and perhaps individual courses. As described to me by a colleague, a professor will tape a semester's worth of lectures, using PowerPoint to create main points. Once these lectures are recorded the company takes over. A company person with a higher degree in the field, will serve as go-between for students and the professor. The professor will never be in direct contact with the students. The success of the venture lies in marketing by the company; create very high enrollments in order to produce impressive income for the institution and the company.

I wonder how many universities have signed on the dotted line with such companies. I also wonder how many such companies are out there.

 

I see that Blackboard recently improved its LMS by adding an outcomes widget. Outcomes. Assessment. A culture of assessment. Continuous assessment. I'm not sure that it really matters what one teaches; the teacher's mission is to engage in a culture of continuous assessment.

I keep hearing that to live the life of assessment (or is the life of outcomes?) the teacher must have specific goals and objectives and how one measures the outcome of the goals and objectives and that this is best achieved by stuffing things into a rubric. Why does the word "rubric" always sound obscene? At any rate I think of a rubric as three-dimensional though I find it odd that the people who most often speak of rubrics are fairly two-dimensional people.

Presumably all this outcomes measurements activities goingson have to do with taking minds and adding to them. People who speak of outcomes and assessments also tend to use the phrase "value added."

An interesting experience from the classroom:

Most of us beyond our early '20s use a term, social networking, to identify activities that have become second nature to Web 2. In a class I determined that I would introduce some scholarly social networks in order to expand their comprehension of social networking.

Luckily, I began by asking "what is social networking?" The class was large and students are often shy about speaking in front of many people. I repeated the question. No raised hands were evident. I changed the question. "How many of you do not know what social networking is?." Now I saw many raised hands.

I pursued the top a bit asking if they knew about or used Facebook, MySpace, or other sites that joined hundreds or thousands of people in communication. Most students participated in social sites.

Suddenly I realized what was happening. My students had been using social networking as a normal and  frequent activity. They were social networking as a matter of course and never needed to be told what we older folk needed a term to comprehend the activity.

I teach a survey of art history class. I use digital images in the classroom and online. While I have several thousand of my own images, my collection is far from comprehensive in chronology and in geography. Arkansas State University twice purchased digital images under a contract with Saskia and others that places severe restrictions on where and how the images may be used (they may be seen only by faculty and students of the university under a secure sign-in system).

I discovered that Flickr has a large store of digital images that may be used for educational purposes. Of these hundreds deal with art and architecture (mostly architecture and sculpture, but with some surprisingly good images of paintings). I never prepare a presentation for my students without checking the holdings of Flickr. Additionally, when I find a particularly good source of images, I bookmark it in del.icio.us so that I may quickly find the collections (under imagearchive) and also share what I have found with others.

A highly de-centralized image management system exists and is also under development at Williams College. Academic Commons published the interview between AC and Henry Art, Biology/Environmental Science, Williams College. Also participating was Jonathan Leamon from Instruction Technology.

Art has thousands of Kodachromes and scans these as needed. He admits that he finds the slides better images but likes the convenience of modern digital images. Prof. Art does his own metadata tagging. Leamon says that Instruction Technology will help faculty with setting up a system for their images. He describes the image management system thus

 

I happened onto a quite wonderful blog on tech and teaching. Learning Technology Teacher Development Blog for ELT.

The blogger, Nik Peachy, describes himself as "...a freelance learning technology consultant, trainer and content designer. At present I'm developing a Business English course for Second Life. I also work on a number of websites aimed at EL teachers for British Council and IATEFL."

The blog often points to new tools that are promising additions to a teacher's arsenal of digital tools. I established a test phone web site that is well designed for the cell screen. Another tool is a clever way of annotating photographs. Peachy adds video demonstrations on use of many of the tools.

Visit. Bookmark--better yet, socially bookmark.

The Wikipedia remains a trashed source in the view of many teachers. Citations for entries is near the top of the list of complaints.

Today I found a useful summary on citations and why we use them. The material is in the Wikipedia, at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources

http://media.nmc.org/sl/audio/slcreativity-sunday.mp3

I'm listening to a podcast originating from Second Life. Voice seems to be enabled everywhere in SL, not just in a few places (as it was a couple of weeks ago). The podcast comes from the New Media Consortium (NMC) Symposium on Creativity in Second Life. I'm not running the connection program, simply listening to the cast as though it were a radio interview.

The event sounds as though it is off to a good start.

 

I labored through forty-five minutes of the YouTube/CNN Demo debate a couple of nights ago and then gave up. Clearly the candidates won. The refreshing questions from videos turned out to be prompts for the candidates to launch into whatever prepared sound bite seemed to be appropriate. During the time I watched, no question was answered.

YouTube was a one-way street. Only the experienced and curious went to YouTube to see the comments left by viewers. Candidates answered no questions and YouTube returned with only a new clip. How educational an evening might have been had if the YouTube question been played again at the end of answers. A second viewing might have reminded viewers how far (and quickly) the candidates moved away from the question.

A more revolutionary digital tool might be IM. With IM the person asking the question might interrupt to say that the candidate was not addressing the question. Of course, something such as that might lead to a mass yearning for plain and honest talk. I doubt that the political system could take it.

I appreciate the comments on my last post.

In terms of student privacy I already include in my syllabus a statement that the other students in the class will see student posts in the Bb discussion board and I suggest that if a student is uncomfortable with that circumstance that they should withdraw from the class (nobody ever has).

In terms of legalities, I wonder if an obvious answer is to simply use Wikipedia as the class site. I start an article and show the students how to add, edit, etc. Would the legal onus then fall on Wikipedia and not on me?

At http://alexreid.typepad.com/digital_digs/2006/08/blackboards_pat.html , Alex Reid's blog, one finds an interesting suggestion that course management systems may have run their course as the most effective way of involving students (as well as education) in online learning. His post comes post-Blackboard's patent.

...perhaps Blackboard's patent is the evil impetus to move us away from a "course-based system" of "online courses:" the bad idea that they want to claim as their fundamental intellectual property.

Alex wonders if blogs and especially wikis might be more beneficial. The wiki would not be completely course based, would not expire at the end of the semester, and would not be limited to students enrolled in the class. The wiki would exist without support from nor approval from the college or university.

What happens if I establish a wiki, not associated with any particular course or even necessarily with my college? I let anyone create an account and participate on the wiki.  I might post material on the wiki and require my students to read it, just as I might ask students to read material on other websites. I might require students to add to the wiki. But it wouldn't be a course-based wiki. That is, it wouldn't be created for a course. It wouldn't start and end with the course. The participants on the wiki would not be limited to students registered in the course. It wouldn't even be limited to members of the college community.

I was disappointed to see that the new ECAR paper on emerging digital content deliver did not include the cell phone. Although the smart phones that students have today are not computers, they will be. I'd guess that over the next two years smart phones will be the computer that students bring to campus. More sophisticated input devices will make the phone an ideal way for students to communicate text, scientific notation, and other special application needs. The new virtual keyboards might be just the thing that will make the phone an acceptable computer for student work.