CELT NEWS

Science, Metaphor, and Explaining to the Non-Specialist

2010-01-15T09:44:00.000-05:00

Really a must read article from Wired, which highlights one of the reasons why it's important to talk with others about what we do is that the process of explaining our cherished theories to others forces us to be more analytical about them:

Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.”

What turned out to be so important, of course, was the unexpected result, the experimental error that felt like a failure. The answer had been there all along — it was just obscured by the imperfect theory, rendered invisible by our small-minded brain. It’s not until we talk to a colleague or translate our idea into an analogy that we glimpse the meaning in our mistake. Bob Dylan, in other words, was right: There’s no success quite like failure.

Collaboration Workforce Trends

2009-12-11T11:01:00.001-05:00

From a recent McKinsey Report:

I know some might think this a a broad definition of “collaborative worker” , but I’m not sure it is. Collaboration is not necessarily about formal teams (although teamwork is a valued skill in collaborative organizations).

Here’s two things that stick out in the report. First, the productivity differences in collaborative enterprises are huge:

Yet there are wide variations in the performance of knowledge workers, as well as in their access to technologies that could improve it. Our research shows that the performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors.¹

And to address that problem, companies are turning to technology:

Just as important is deciding how to support interactions with technology—in particular, Web 2.0 tools such as social networks, wikis, and video. There is potential for sizeable gains from even modest improvements. Our survey research shows that at least 20 percent and as much as 50 percent of collaborative activity results in wasted effort. And the sources of this waste—including poorly planned meetings, unproductive travel time, and the rising tide of redundant e-mail communications, just to name a few—are many and growing in knowledge-intense industries.

Which brings me to this brilliant flash animation which describes the collaboration technologies people in different careers are going to have to master if we want to start narrowing that 9-to-1 gap.

It’s probably the most important thing you will look at this week, and it’s not from a slick Web 2.0 shop – it’s from the great boring McKinsey: View It Now.

Community-Based Learning Tops Employer Wish List

2009-12-07T13:23:00.003-05:00

I’m looking through some of the AAC&U data for LEAP, and I found this interesting tidbit. In the 2008 Peter D. Hart Research poll of business leaders, business leaders emphatically state that they want colleges to apply assessment resources into internships and community-based learning over other alternatives. And it is by a wide margin, too – for non-CEO executives (who are presumably closer to the ground truth of what they need) it actually nabs over 50% of the vote, outstripping both e-portfolios and integrative essay tests:

.
While this particular poll data is new to me, the results are not surprising at all – for a long time the business community has been demanding authentic assessment.

And of course educational experts have been recommending authentic assessment as well.

So why aren’t we there yet?

The Reverse of Homework

2009-12-03T09:11:00.001-05:00

I'm liking this new phrase floating around: "The Reverse of Homework".

What does it mean? Pretty simple: the old paradigm was you lecture and model activity in class, then you send your students home to do it on their own.

But what folks are doing now is recording the lectures (including the application modelling), and having the students view those outside of class. Then students come into class to do their work, with your expert assistance.

Participatory Culture

2009-12-01T10:50:00.011-05:00

One comment made on the recent draft of the ISP New Media Fluency goals was that the term Participatory Media might not be the best term. I think that's true in a sense -- certainly it is not as familiar a term as, say, Quantitative Literacy. But it does have a meaning and a history (and wide acceptance) in the current discussions around how we expect our students to use technology after they leave us for the wider world.

So I'm backing up a little and thinking of how we might define participatory media succinctly, in a way that resonates with the core goals of faculty and the college. Participatory media are the tools used to engage in participatory culture, and I think one of the better definitions of participatory culture is from the MacArthur Report Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. In it, participatory culture is defined as:

a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). Forms of participatory culture include:

Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).

There's a couple things about this definition worth noting. One is that it chooses to see collaboration as a facet of participatory culture (a point that was made at the meeting: the line here between participation and collaboration is admittedly fuzzy). I'm fine with seeing participation as the broad umbrella term, although I think in practice the use of tools for business and civic collaboration require a distinct set skills from those of broader participatory culture, and we probably need to teach those differences explicitly.

But also note in that what is defined as participatory culture is precisely the sort of environment in which most of our students will continue their learning. One of the key goals of integrative education is teaching students how to continue learning on their own -- if we avoid teaching them how to interact with technology-mediated communities, we really haven't done that.

The report continues, addressing why we need to teach students to navigate these cultures:

A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace.

...

Educators must work together to ensure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, can articulate their understanding of how media shapes perceptions, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities. A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement.

That's really the key here, and what I think bears repeating. Those students who do not master these skills will be increasingly denied opportunities available to their more adept peers. Participation in the world of work requires that students master collaborative technology -- already, today. Students unable to navigate participatory media increasingly lock themselves out of full civic participation, as the internet has become the new commons. And corporate culture, straining under the coordination costs of top-down management, is increasingly relying on the tools of participatory media to coordinate projects and disseminate knowledge.

On a more social scale, it's about more than giving our students a leg up over the competition. It's that we share the democratic belief that greater participation leads to greater diversity, greater equity, and better solutions. Participation in society and business is increasingly mediated through these technologies -- when we graduate students who are functionally illiterate in these areas we all suffer a loss: of voices that won't be heard, solutions that won't be found, and connections that won't be made.

I know it's really difficult, that it maybe feels like we are not the best people to teach these skills. But it's really imperative that someone teach these to our students...

Anyway, I'm veering towards rhetorical here, perhaps time to sign off...

Team-Based Learning

2009-11-02T13:22:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Michaelsen, Knight, and Fink's Team-based Learning from 2002, and I've been taking away a lot more than I thought I would. It's not that everything I assumed about team-based learning was wrong -- more that I didn't realize how big an effect small changes can have on the success (or failure)of a team-based learning project.

Michaelsen's article, for example, discusses what he terms the "Four Essential Principles" of team-based learning, at at first glance they look fairly pedestrian:

1) Groups must be properly formed and managed.
2) Students must be made accountable
3) Team assignments must promote both learning and team development
4) Students must receive frequent and immediate feedback

Nothing you haven't seen before, right?

But the smaller points under each principle, combined with the results of his previous research, make pretty interesting reading. Take points under proper formation and management of groups:

a) Allowing students to form their own groups virtually guarantees the creation of potentially destructive subgroups (Feichtner & Davis 1985, Michaelsen & Black 1994).

b) Learning teams should be large and diverse, consisting of five to seven members, and as heterogenous as possible. (Watson, Kumar, and Michaelsen, 1993 [on diversity as crucial asset])

c) Groups should be permanent, and utilized throughout the course as most groups require between 20-25 hours of collaborative work together before all members of the group begin to benefit (Watson, Michaelsen & Sharp, 1991).

The other sections are as interesting.

No real revolutionary point here, except perhaps that I'll be finished with this book in a couple of days, if anyone wants to borrow it after that, let me know -- you won't be disappointed.

Managing Student Advising with Google Forms

2009-10-15T14:15:00.004-04:00

Education professor Jason Endacott has found a simple yet highly effective way to manage student advising sign-ups by using Google Forms. Meeting with 60 advisees was time consuming enough but add to it scheduling and communication management, he found that his time was getting consumed by mundane tasks. To free up his time and to make it easier for his students to schedule meetings Jason embedded a Google Form into his web site. Students could easily sign-up for available advising slots and Jason no longer had to be bogged down with managing schedules and email confirmations. In this 4:335 minute video Jason discusses how he uses Google Forms and the benefits to his students.

If you're interested in learning how to use Google Forms or other Google Applications, let us know.

Student Blogging Rubric

2009-10-13T06:30:00.022-04:00

This is a project designed for ninth graders, from the ReadWriteThink site, but it has a lot of reusable bits pertinent to college instruction.

The project is a class blogging exercise, the sort that one might use in a blended course. Students post their analysis to a class blog, and then comment on two or more of their peer analyses.

What I like best though, is the rubric. It's clear, and much of it is about the content and presentation of the post the student puts together. But a crucial 12 points on the rubric's 1-100 scale are dependent on the community interaction. In fact, community participation is weighted almost as highly as the other three areas.

Check it out, and let me know what you think.

Twitter: What are You Teaching Right Now

2009-10-12T08:22:00.002-04:00

Submitted by Matthew Ragan
Note from CELT: if you missed the brown bag presentation, scroll to the bottom of this post for the Vimeo video.

Before we get to "Why?" I think it's important to quickly cover what Twitter actually does. Twitter is a micro-bloging service that allows you to communicate with a network of like-minded individuals. Once you create a Twitter account, your home page appears as a timeline of your "tweets," as well as the "tweets," of those you follow. A "tweet" is a single post to Twitter. Just like a "blog" can reference a single article on a web log, a "tweet" refers to a single post on Twitter. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, so you've gotta say a lot by saying a little.

That's a lot of abstraction, so imagine it this way: Let's say that your family is spread across the country. You've elected to use Twitter specifically for the purpose of following what's happening in the lives of your family. You create an account, and everyone in your family does as well. When you sign into Twitter your homepage displays your timeline, which contains all of your "tweets" as well as those from your family. Suddenly, you can see what's happening in the lives of those that matter to you, and can share your own adventures (or maybe misadventures) and accomplishments with your loved ones. Instead of being an email or a text message that you have to read and respond to, a tweet is a simple declaration that you can choose to read or ignore.

What gets exciting about Twitter are the applications of this idea. The true functionality and accessibility of Twitter comes from it's connection to cell phones. By registering your mobile device with your account you can have tweets forwarded to, and post tweets from, your phone. You don't need to have everyone's tweet's forwarded (you know Uncle Bob, he's always inappropriate, and his tweets are no different), in fact you can choose to not have any tweets forwarded to your phone. The fun is in posting updates by sending a text message. Rather than carrying a laptop with you to record and share the details of the little league game, or the delicious dinner, or the beautiful sunset, or the beautiful leaf peeping, or the delayed plane, or the car accident ten cars ahead of you, or or or, and and and. Now, suddenly your phone is a whole different kind of device. Journal about life 140 characters at a time, or keep family posted about the trip you're taking across the country. You use your phone to connect to the net and communicate with a single individual or thousands of people with only one text message. Do you have a camera attached to your phone? Well, if that's the case then you can post the pictures you take with your phone to Twitter as well.

Still not convinced, consider the story of a University of California-Berkeley graduate student who was able to Tweet his way out of prison after a misunderstanding in Egypt [http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/twitter.buck/index.html?iref=newssearch]. Or consider the impact of Twitter on our most recent presidential election. Or the impact of twitter in connection to the Iranian election. Caught somewhere between party-line, message board, and instant message Twitter is changing what we think of social media.

So Why?

Twitter reflects much of what we experience in our daily lives. We have a mass network of people that we're connected to, and who we like to share information with reciprocally. Some situations are predicated upon single directed flows of information, and some are organized around group collaboration. Suddenly I can be the only one from my team at a conference, but able to update everyone back at the office with real-time information. Post a new blog? Let everyone in your network know by tweeting. Looking for a poll of thoughts or experiences, ask in a tweet. Looking for a quick way to have a group conversation with people scattered across the city, state, country, world, Twitter can let you do that. Twitter is only limited by the users ingenuity, and part of what's pushing it's growth is the new and clever uses being implemented daily.

The MacArthur Foundation published the abstract from their Living and Learning with new Media project last November. In it they highlight the dramatic change that's developing in how youth use and communicate with new technologies. One of the more interesting suggestions in the paper is that youth consider cell phones to be part of their identity. Cell phones now allow youth to update Facebook, post to Twitter, share pictures and messages with friends, write blogs, and almost anything internet based. Cell phones are online identity construction. In that sense, cell phones connect to deeply emotional and identity motivated ideas and behaviors. With that in mind, it's no wonder that a service that allows the individual to connect with anyone and everyone would not only be valuable, but exciting and inspiring.

So what about Education?

The only limits for the application of this technology are the limits you impose. There are many online resources about educators who are already using Twitter in their classrooms daily. Below you'll find a list of links with summaries of where they direct you on the net. More interesting is to consider how you might use Twitter in a new and playful way. An English course could head out into downtown Keene to compose haikus as they are inspired. A class that attends a play or film could tweet their 140 character review after the show. Students could collect rain fall or snow fall data and tweet it so it could be later organized by location and quantity. Much like a neighborhood watch, students could be encouraged to communicate about suspicious individuals. It could be used for a thousand different things; but when it comes down to it, the real ingenuity will come from students. Ask your students how they use Twitter... more importantly, how you should.

Did you miss the 53 minute brown bag presentation last week? Watch it on Vimeo:

Twitter: What are you Teaching Right Now?

Resources:
10 Twitter Mythconceptions - The things you've heard about Twitter, but just aren't quite right
http://technologizer.com/2009/05/11/ten-twitter-mythconceptions/

To get Twitter you Gotta Tweet - Real understanding comes from doing
http://velocitymg.com/explorations/leveraging-learning/to-get-twitter-you-gotta-tweet/

What Did They Tweet - Favorite tweets from Teacher ReBoot Camp
http://teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org/category/what-did-they-tweet/

Teachers Take on Twitter - How are educators using twitter, look at one 4th grade teacher's use
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tsb/articles/2009/10/01/01twitter.h03.html

The Best Twitters for Sharing Resource Links - a sampling of interesting people to follow
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/07/21/the-best-twitterers-for-sharing-resource-links/

Twitter Help for Educators - a little clunky, but still has some strong resources
http://www.vrml.k12.la.us/curriculum/tech/socialnetwork/twitter/twitter.htm

Teachers Using Technolog - a list of educators on twitter
http://tweepml.org/Teachers-using-technology/

Study: Twitter users are mobile, urban, and engaged online - Who is really using twitter?
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/02/study-twitter-users-are-mobile-urban-and-engaged-online.ars

Twitter Now Growing - How fast was Twitter growing back in March?
http://mashable.com/2009/03/16/twitter-growth-rate-versus-facebook/

AT Welcomes Judy Brophy

2009-10-06T11:45:00.003-04:00

Please welcome Judy Brophy who has accepted a 2-year term position with Academic Technology while AT Specialist Wendy Petschik assists Professional and Graduate Studies with the implementation of TK20.

Judy brings a wealth of experience supporting faculty with the integration of academic technology into the curriculum. Previous to her new role at KSC, she worked as the Educational Technology Specialist/Instructional Designer for 6 years at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, NH. Her knowledge of online learning environments such as Google tools and her experience supporting the use of common applications to transfer abstract ideas into practical solutions will be the mainstay of her responsibilities.

Judy earned a M.S in Instructional Technology from Rochester Institute of Technology, an M.S. in Library Science from UMASS – Lowell and her B.A. in Philosophy from Miami University. Her first day is Thursday, 10/8 - please drop in and welcome her to KSC. She is located in Rhodes Hall N105 and can be reached at jbrophy@keene.edu / 603-358-2384.

Flexible Learning Space

2009-09-28T14:41:00.000-04:00

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!

2009-09-25T14:00:00.002-04:00

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).

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.
Provide students with models and guidelines for "how much is good enough".
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

2009-09-24T14:49:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-23T16:52:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-22T14:50:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-21T16:45:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-09-18T08:08:00.012-04:00

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

2009-09-17T11:55:00.005-04:00

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

2009-09-16T16:58:00.001-04:00

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"

2009-09-15T16:06:00.004-04:00

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

2009-09-14T10:30:00.005-04:00

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

2009-09-11T08:38:00.013-04:00

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

2009-09-10T10:23:00.011-04:00

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"

2009-09-09T10:16:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-04T16:36:00.003-04:00

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

2009-09-03T10:35:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-02T14:05:00.002-04:00

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!)

2009-09-01T12:12:00.000-04:00

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...)

Autism and Google SketchUp

2009-08-31T14:18:00.000-04:00

Larry Welkowitz came across this recently, and reminded us that free visual tools like this can make a world of difference with kids on the autism spectrum:

He writes:

I've written quite a bit about using technology to help young people with ASD's discover career opportunities and Google's Sketch-Up should be added to the list. A few years ago we were lucky when one of our faculty (an architect) discovered that one of our College students (with high functioning Autism) had amazing three dimensional modeling skills. This lead to a series of opportunities and that student is now gainfully employed with a local firm doing Computer Assisted Design.

Does anyone have any other experience with tools that make a difference in these situations? Any stories to share?

Google Apps for Education Event Recap

2009-08-20T12:45:00.000-04:00

Fifteen faculty, staff, and students turned out for a CELT sponsored webinar on the use of Google Apps in the classroom on August 5, 2009.

The seminar was purchased through a third party, and in general the reaction of the attendees to the material was good, with most attendees saying they panned to use some piece of Google Apps in their practice. However, most attendees felt the seminar could have been better, and would have liked to see the seminar focus on dealing with classroom specific issues, such as student permissions, innovative pedagogy, and ways Google Apps could be used for student collaboration.

We will be running at least one more seminar on Google Apps this semester, and will try to make sure our next seminar, whether purchased or produced in-house, addresses these issues more fully.

Don't know what Google Apps for Education is? We'd love to show you what is is, and how others on campus are using it change their practice. Stop by CELT in Rhodes hall, or email mcaulfield@keene.edu or jdarrow@keene.edu to set up an appointment to talk about using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom.