Flexible Learning Space

Yi Gong, Professor of Education, didn't let the physical confines of his classroom or the large number of students deter him from meeting the learning outcomes of his course. Determined to model small group instruction with his class of 35 education majors, Yi decided to move into a space that could accommodate his needs. Where did he go? He simply rolled his portable whiteboard into the Rhodes Hall atrium where he had wireless connectivity and couches. Below is a 36 second clip of Yi talking about his temporary move:

It's Post Time! and....They're Off!

Ellen Nuffer, Professor of Education, presented a brown bag lecture on the the various and creative ways she uses discussion boards to foster a collaborative learning environment. She covered a wide range of topics including how she manages the discussion board for 1st semester freshman who might be unsure about tone, quality, and collaboration versus upper level students who have more experience posting and providing feedback to peers. While there were a number of takeaways, Ellen provided three recommendations for faculty interested in adopting discussion boards (this is a compressed version of her recommendations).

1. Only use discussion boards for postings that you and your students feel comfortable being public. Just as in-class discussion is "public", discussion board postings need to be the kind of material that students feel comfortable sharing.
2. Provide students with models and guidelines for "how much is good enough". 
3. Set up guidelines for yourself about responding. Review your reasons and your learning objectives for this assignment. How much of this needs to be fully assessed, commented, or graded by you and how much can skimmed and merely credited as "acceptable" or "not acceptable"?
   

In this short video clip (48 seconds) Ellen talks about how she was able to conduct class virtually by using Blackboard's collaboration and communication tools:

Set Up Your Own Class Wiki in Less Than Three Minutes

Want to use a wiki in your class? Have a Gmail account?

Here's how to use your Google Account to set up a wiki in under three minutes.

Free online screencasting tool

Ah, you say, but what about student permissions? What about editing pages?

Well, that's coming -- stay tuned!

Worldware and Mint.com

One thing we are passionate about at CELT is embracing "worldware" -- we want to help make sure that the tools the students use in the classroom to solve problems are the same sort of tools they can use to solve problems when they graduate. The reason we push the use of low-or-no-cost software like Google Apps or WordPress to solve collaboration problems rather than specialized "teaching" software is that it empowers students -- it sends a strong message to students that they are in charge of their own future, and that the tools they need to change their life (or perhaps the world) are available to them.

That's why I found this insight about the recent startup Mint.com so interesting:

Yesterday, at a panel I moderated in San Francisco, Donna Wells, Mint.com's chief marketing officer, stunned a room full of digital marketing pros by noting that she really didn't have much of a marketing budget. Mint.com has gone from zero to 1.5 million users in two years with no ad campaign, save a mid-five-figures sum spent on search engine terms. Rather than purchase traffic, it has pursued the same type of strategy that food trucks and online magazines do: Using free social media and piggybacking on popular new communications technology. Mint.com has more than 36,000 Facebook fans and 19,000 Twitter followers, a well-trafficked blog, and a popular iPhone application.

Mint.com, which advises customers on how to pinch pennies, does some penny-pinching of its own. It uses Wordpress (free) to run its Web site and blog. To analyze traffic partners, conversion rates, and other essentials of an online business that generates its revenues through lead generation, it uses Google analytics (free and sufficiently simple that Wells' marketing staff can use it without the help of software experts)...

.

Mint.com isn't a geeky product, or a fad -- at 1.5 million users it's company that was poised to compete with industry giants Inuit and Quicken before the recent buyout. And to get to that point it used the some of the same tools that are available to our students here for nothing.

That wasn't the case when I went to college. If you wanted to do something big, you needed a lot of money, you needed media buys, lots of employees, bricks and mortar overhead. You needed detailed specs, long business plans, and decent connections.

That's just not the case anymore. Students with the drive and the intellect have access to the tools they need to start changing the world today if they want. And putting those tools in student hands and letting them know that is one of the most empowering things we can do for them.

CELT Announces Google Apps Support Groups

A number of faculty are using Google Apps in the classroom this semester (or planning to use Google Apps next semester). In order to better support faculty who are using Google Apps, CELT is putting together a support group. The group would primarily interact via an online forum, with occasional face-to-face meetings.

We anticipate discussions in the group will cover a wide range of subjects -- from how to integrate a wiki or blog into a course, to the finer points of tweaking privacy settings. CELT staff will facilitate discussions in the group, but most of the value will be faculty-to-faculty information sharing. If you are using Google Apps in the classroom, or just interested to find out how others are using Web 2.0 technology in their own instruction, please consider joining the group. Lurkers are welcome!

You can sign up for the support group here. Group traffic is expected to be relatively low, but you will have the option to set mail preferences to “digest” or "online-only" if you are concerned about email volume.

We look forward to seeing you in the group!

TracDat Sneak Peek, Part One

One of my many jobs here is providing support for our TracDat roll-out. I'm giving a presentation to the cabinet tomorrow, and thought I might show what TracDat is via a screencast.

In the screencast below I cut straight to the chase -- moving directly to answer the question "What is it?". Those wondering "Why are we using it?" will probably have to wait for a future screencast.

The idea of TracDat is simple -- it's a place to store the outcomes and assessments that we are already doing so that the results of those assessments can be reported out in a common way, and so that all our documentation of our assessment work is stored in a central place.

It's pretty straightforward. This is Part I, which should give you a whirlwind tour of the top tabset: outcomes, assessments, findings, and reports.

Work. Finish. Publish. Release.

We’ve been talking a lot about “transparency” and what it means for academic work. In fact it’s written into the Academic Affairs Technology Plan under the principle of “openness”, but what does transparency mean, or more important, what does it look like? This question returned a wealth of resources that pointed to individual examples but the most interesting project that demonstrated transparency (to its fullest definition), is the growing movement called “Open Notebook Science.”

The idea behind the project is that the research process, generally guarded and impenetrable until publication time, is made visible and reusable to anyone and everyone. This involves opening your ‘notebook’ and posting data, raw and unfiltered, and research methodology, online. Transparency in this case, according to chemistry professor Dr. Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel University “facilitates rapid access to existing and new collaborators, as well as exposing our work to the scrutiny of many, which can only make it better.” Though this idea might seem radical it’s not breaking new ground and is actually part of a growing trend in science towards transparency. Certainly not all research is suited for this approach but in cases where data can be shared to move forward related research without compromising intellectual property it can have significant contributions.

How is research shared in a collaborative, public environment? Dr. Bradley explains:

"There is currently a growing movement in science to make research results more accessible, fueled in part by pressure from funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.

We have found that social software tools such as blogs, wikis and mailing lists can be used very effectively to disseminate active research prior to publication in traditional journals. A wiki can serve as a convenient online laboratory notebook, with each experiment recorded on a new page. Additions and changes to the wiki are easily tracked with its built-in version tracking system. The use of a hosted wiki further affords third-party time stamps to prove who knew what when. The blog component serves as a convenient vehicle to report milestones and discuss project ideas, linking back to specific experimental details in the wiki."

The use of such a system allows other researchers to benefit from information gleaned from “failed” or incomplete experiments. Perhaps of even greater importance, working openly can catalyze the forging of new collaborations that would not otherwise have formed. All of the docking and testing collaborations that we currently have came about as a result of disseminating our results using social software.” (For the full text interview: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8706sci2.html)

Another benefit of the open approach is that as the number of researchers increases, the quality of information returned by internet searches will increase; a direct benefit of the collective intelligence of the entire community of people participating and contributing. While this definition is on one end of the spectrum, it provides an example of how some are approaching transparency.

For more information about Dr. Bradley and the Open Notebook Science, visit the following sites:
E-Learning Blog: http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com
E-Learning Podcast and Screencast: http://drexel-coas-talks-mp3-podcast.blogspot.com
Open Science Research Blog: http://usefulchem.blogspot.com

National Day On Writing

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has declared October 20th a National Day on Writing, and the Writing Task Force is hosting an all-day event in the Mountain View Room designed to make visible and celebrate the central place of writing in our lives.

Mark Long, professor of English, is interested in featuring the writing we do on blogs. He is interested in blogs associated with work at Keene State as well as blogs that are not directly associated with our on-campus work. Please send Mark your URL, and he will feature your blog as part of the “Keene is Writing” project: mlong@keene.edu

CELT to launch Google Support Group for Faculty Using Google Apps in the Classroom

We'll have more on this later, but given the large number of faculty that are using Google Apps in the classroom, and the need to support these experiments better we are putting together a Google support group, where faculty teaching with Google Apps can get together and help each other out. Ideally, participation in the group would be mostly virtual, managed through a low volume Google Groups mailing list, with short face to face meetings scheduled every couple of weeks. Someone from CELT will attend the face to face meetings.

If you are either using Google Apps in the classroom, or considering using Google Apps in the near future, please contact celt@keene.edu and we'll get started pulling this together.Thanks!

Event Recap and Video: Betsy Street and Steve Bigaj present on "Social Bookmarking"

Thanks to Betsy Street and Steve Bigaj for an interesting hour on the subject of how Delicious has helped them share resources across their organization.

Betsy started by telling us how she came across the social bookmarking concept in a presentation Jenny gave last year -- and realized how it could solve a persistent problem they had been having at the Monadnock Center for Successful Transitions. Then, as a short explanation of what social bookmarking is, she used the excellent Common Craft video explanation:



Steve talked about some of the challenges of using Delicious with users that aren't always that tech-savvy. The one thing he kept coming back to as they built out their Delicious resource collection was idea in the Common Craft video that it was about sharing information in a networked way. As he pointed out:

"Those lines between all the people in that video? That's what we do."

We are not able to get video of the whole presentation, since we captured some people in portions who requested not have their image posted to YouTube. In the future we are looking at designating "no shoot" zones so that we can make sure to capture larger portions, and also to get the technology together to capture the presenter's screen.

The session was very well attended, with a capacity crowd for the room, and many expressed interest in getting additional information on social bookmarking. Thanks to Jenny, Steve and Betsy for putting this together.

Building an IQL Course From the Data Out

I'm meeting with a quite a few people doing interesting things around quantitative literacy, and I can't help but be amazed with the audacity of what they are attempting. If any of you are reading this post, know that you all are my heroes.

It occurs to me though that many people developing IQL start building courses from a different direction than I would start. Usually the course is nearly fully developed before the professor begins to try to seek out publicly available data for the students to use to defend or attack quantitative propositions. And very often that data turns out to be spotty, shallow, or not directly manipulable with the tools that students have access to (data, for instance, that is locked up in PDF charts).

This is understandably frustrating -- it's difficult to push students to do real analysis when the data is limited.

That's where the concept of building a course "from the data out" comes in.

When you build a course from the data out, you identify the data sources you will use early in the course design process. Say you want to teach a quantitative literacy course, and you would like it to be on the general topic of poverty and health. When you design from the data out you start by doing an inventory of public data sources pertaining to the subject.

Looking at the data you can ask yourself these sort of questions:

• What sort of activities could students do with the available data?
• Are there opportunities here fro original analysis?
• Is the data rich and varied enough to support multiple viewpoints?
• Will the data work with free visualization tools?
• Are there collaboration or crowdsourcing opportunities?

In other words, start by building rich authentic activities and projects around the data, and then start to work backwards to the larger course structure which will help give meaning and relevance to the activities and projects, and your job will be a lot easier.

It's All About Your Network

I just concluded a talk about Twitter with the Keene State College Computer Science Department and am feeling pretty positive about their direction. It’s exciting that they’re engaging in this conversation; they asked honest questions about social networking in general and Facebook versus Twitter more specifically. We discussed how the purpose of environments (intensely social in Facebooks case) can dictate the success of classroom adoption and how it’s critical for faculty to show the utility of less social, less used (with this demographic anyway) applications such as Twitter.

We covered a lot of ground in 60 minutes but we landed on a few keys for Twitter rookies :

#1) PLN – Personal Learning Network
Use Twitter as a personal information aggregator by following great thinkers. I shared with them a tweet from one of my favorite bloggers/tweeter who had this to say about PLN’s.

“by far, my educator/professional Twitter network has been more immediately useful than any *offline* PD I’ve ever attended”

#2) Event Notification
Use tweets to inform your network about events such as the “Jelly” gathering at the Marlboro College Grad Center or to let folks know about job opportunities. New blog posts, workshops or brown-bag talks are also a great ways to notify your local network about important information.

#3) Lean on Your Network
Use your network to get answers, suggestions, or ideas. If your network are thinkers, doers, and participators, you won’t be disappointed!

#4) Levity
Follow Steven Colbert (stephenathome). Enough said.

#5) Build Out Your Network
This is probably the single most important advise that I can give anyone new to Twitter. Twitter is only as good as you network. It’s pretty easy really:

a) Have a purpose for using Twitter
b) Find 5 or 6 people that you want to follow and build from there
c) Check out their network. Chances are you will find a few who are worth following
d) Tweet, re-Tweet, contribute, and participate

The conversation eventually circled back to using Twitter in the classroom. There ere are many resources online that outline ideas for its use including a wonderful YouTube video "The Twitter Experiment"; a 5 minute clip outlining how Professor Monica Rankin of the University of Texas - Dallas used Twitter.






50 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom
https://tle.wisc.edu/solutions/engagement/50-ways-use-twitter-classroom

Delicious search “twitter in the classroom” which will yield a number of great results
http://delicious.com

Jenny

Stanford Class Combines Cooking with Politics

We're always on the lookout for ways in which other institutions are trying integrative approaches to education. There's an awful lot of schools that have done nice interdisciplinary work in this area, but what's rarer is to see courses embrace the other aims of integrative education -- namely to help students make explicit connections between academic work and both their community life and their personal life.

Food, because it is a part of our daily experience, is a really neat place to start discussions on how academic issues relate to personal choices and values. If you can look at an issue through the prism of food (ugh, not the image I was going for there...), you've not only tied that issue to their personal life, but you've tied it to their daily experience.

Here's a course at Stanford which combines experiential and integrative learning in a way that I think is pretty neat:



I'm actually not a foodee myself, or a slow-food believer, but I love the way the course ties ethics and politics to daily life:

"Eating is a political and ethical act," Reich said. "It's also incredibly personal. It's the daily thing which nourishes us, but we know so little about the path that ingredients take from where they were produced to the point where they get into our mouths."

Reich wants his students to unravel some of that mystery by having them take turns planning lunches and dinners, shopping for groceries and cooking the ingredients. Considering what to buy and how to prepare it forces them to reckon with their food, he says.

I'm talking this afternoon to someone running a food-themed course here at Keene State, I hope to report later this week some of the stuff we are doing in this area.

Event, 9/15: Betsy Street and Steve Bigaj present on "Social Bookmarking"

From Jenny Darrow, Director of Academic Technology:

Social Bookmarking: A personal and group organization tool

Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious are powerful web 2.0 applications used for storing, sharing, and discovering web sites. We all know that finding valuable web resources takes time and it can be difficult to organize sites in manner in which they can be used at a later date. Delicious is a social bookmarking website (very different from a social networking site like Facebook) where the real utility comes when users find creative ways to leverage the collaborative nature of the web to build a community of practice. Join Betsy Street and Steve Bigaj as they discuss how they conceptualized and organized a Delicious site to share resources across the state for the Monadnock Center for Successful Transitions (MCST).

Date: Tuesday 9/15/09
Time: Noon
Location: Student Center 309

We hope to see you there!

Games and Simulations

We are seeing a number of faculty experimenting with designing games and simulations this semester, in some very exciting ways.

It's probably to early to go into what those experiments entail, although many are quite ambitious. But it's not too early to make a plea -- if you use games or simulations in your class to make learning seem more "real", please let us know. We'd love to share your activity with others on campus.

One of the things we're hoping to get a chance to walk through over at CELT when we get 10 free minutes in a row is this new version of the "Real Lives" simulation, a tool that's supposed to give students a global perspective by walking them through a simulation of life in foreign countries. You can see a demo here:

http://www.educationalsimulations.com/virtual.html

Has anyone out there used this before? Any reactions to it? Is it worth exploring? Would you recommend it to other faculty?

And if you haven't used it, are you interested in trying out the demo and letting us know what you think about it?

Knight Community Information Challenge 2010 Announced

The Knight Community Information Challenge for 2010 has been announced, and since it is one of the more interesting (and well-funded) challenges out there, and since the aims of the challenge intersect with our desire to build meaningful partnerships with our local community I thought I'd mention it here.

Briefly, here is what the challenge is about:

Getting the news and information we need to improve our communities is more important than ever. Send us your project. We seek innovations that use new or available technology to distribute content in local communities. Take part in the $5 million annual Knight News Challenge contest. Anybody worldwide can apply.

There are three rules to follow to apply to the 2010 Knight News Challenge:

• Use digital, open-source technology.
• Distribute news in the public interest.
• Test your project in a local community.

The most obvious candidates for projects might be from journalism and new media, but it is possible to imagine a whole range of things under the general heading of public information. A system that gets a community information about current levels of contaminants in city water or the current pollen count in a city has a public safety angle, but would certainly qualify for the challenge. Citizen Science, when envisioned as having a news end product, might also be covered.

If you are interested in this project, stop by. I've followed this challenge a couple of years, and would be happy to give anyone a tour of the projects of past recipients. We can even show you some of the interesting areas in public data that remain to be addressed.

Inter-Campus Pedagogy: The Looking For Whitman Project

As we move through the semester, we hope to use this web space to let everyone know about interesting experiments in education happening on both on our campus and on other campuses. This particular project we are highlighting today was brought to our attention by some of our friends at the University of Mary Washington.

One of the interesting things technology makes possible is experimentation with changing the traditional boundaries of the classroom and the institution. The Looking For Whitman project that is going right now at four seperate campuses around the country is one of the better examples of this. The project combines a traditional teaching approach (making connections between the work of a local author and the immediate environment of the college or university) with a new technological twist -- the students are working in sync with students at other campuses studying their own slice of the author's work:

Each school involved in the project has been carefully chosen for its lead faculty members, its location, and (of course) for its students. ”Looking for Whitman” centers on three locations, each very important to Walt Whitman’s life and work.

In New York, where Whitman lived from his birth to mid-life, students from the New York City College of Technology, CUNY will explore Whitman’s connections to the Brooklyn Waterfront, Lower Manhattan, and Long Island, and will focus particularly on Whitman’s early work, including the landmark 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass. At the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, students will consider Whitman’s mid-career experiences as a nurse in the Civil War, and will focus on his war-related writing of the 1860s. Students in two classes at Rutgers University-Camden will explore Whitman’s late career as they investigate Camden, the city in which Whitman spent the final decades of his long life. Our fourth location, in Serbia, is a wonderful addition to the project that will make it international in scope.

The technological piece is in how the classes are able to interact with one another. Students can listen to shared audio of selected lectures from other institutions and have inter-campus conversations via twitter and blog posts. They can follow the discussions happening in the other classes, and even participate. They are currently sharing photos from their individual classes on the web (via Flickr) and will later post pictures of some of the local landmarks associated with Whitman to share with all the concurrent classes.

In a recent blog post, Jim Groom talks about some of the experiments they are doing to create open classrooms for this project at UMW, and I encourage those interested in the technology aspect to read how technology is enhancng this course (Among other things, it looks like the course may include a project where students collectively annotate work of Whitman's).

The project is partially funded by a larger NEH grant promoting multi-campus experiments. You can read the CUNY press release on the project here. All products of the project (technological and otherwise) will be shared freely with any other campus that wants to use them.

If you are interested in starting a multi-campus project, but don't know where to start, come and talk to us, and we will try to help you put something together.

And if you know of other similar projects, happening here or elsewhere, please note them in the comments...

Designing a Syllabus That Can Survive Campus Shutdown (Give Us Your Ideas!)

In case you missed it, the NY Times recently reported that we may be witnessing the evolution of a more severe strain of H1N1.

And that's just the latest in a string of bad news about H1N1. So it's no surprise that as we start the fall semester many faculty we are working with have expressed concern that their courses are not "shutdown friendly".

There's a number of things you can do to make sure your class can continue, even in the face of a campus shutdown.

First, and most importantly, provide students information on where they should go for instruction in the case of a shutdown, and do it starting the first day of class. Ideally put this information in a couple of places -- in the printed syllabus, on the Blackboard site, or in any other place students might look. As long as your instructions are consistent, more is better in this circumstance. I've pasted the "boilerplate" language in the comments below.

Second, if your plan to run your class during a shutdown involves online technology such as Blackboard forums, blogs, wikis, emailed assignments -- whatever -- introduce these technologies to the students (and yourself) early in the semester. Don't make the first time you are trying to run an online forum in your class the week the campus shuts down.

Third, consider having an alternate syllabus on hand. An alternate syllabus might replace some class sessions with extra reading and a reader response journal. Or maybe it would point the students to some of the many free lectures they can view online.

Remember that a closed campus will restrict the access of students to student services and campus resources. Research requiring access to Mason Library and assignments requiring specific equipment (e.g. access to Science Center or Media Arts Center machines) will have to be redesigned or postponed.

These are just a few ideas -- as we start to see more of the innovative ways faculty are dealing with this issue, we are starting to get a better handle on this issue. CELT is willing to help you figure out alternatives, and share what other people are doing as we confront this possibility -- stop by and visit us in Rhodes Hall. Bring your syllabus and will come up with some options.

Now for the important part -- what are your ideas or concerns? Please share (even professors who are not from KSC -- please chime in and leave ideas in the comments, we're all in this together...)