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...)

Autism and Google SketchUp

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

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.