Managing Learning Technology

Tweeting about Twitter for Teaching & Learning

2012-02-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

In the fall of 2011 I was invited to give a keynote address to a conference on learning technology. In Singapore.

Sadly, I was to remain in Los Angeles. I delivered the talk virtually--using videoconferencing hardware.

For my topic, I picked: 26 Ways of Looking at Twitter: Three Frameworks for Teaching & Learning.

If You Don't Know What Twitter Is, I Feel Your Pain.

If you don't know--and there's no reason you should care--twitter is an online service that sends and receives 140-character messages to and from cell phones and computers and other online devices.

The original idea of Twitter was to "blog" from your phone. That is: you'd type a short (SMS) text message, and it would quickly show up on a web site such as twitter.com/yournamehere. This way, you could keep a kind of online diary, even while on-the-go.

Then Twitter exploded.

People built all kinds of software tools to send "tweets" to and from all kinds of web sites. Twitter is much-talked-about. TV news shows now invite viewers to tweet (send them messages), and the messages are read on the air. (Phones are apparently too time-consuming, email too taxing.)

Doubling Down on Wallace Stevens.

After drafting my talk, I decided to crank it up a notch. I would not only invent 26 uses of Twitter for teaching and learning: I would write my talk in the form of tweets (140-character messages)--52 of them, to be exact.

My line of thinking began with Wallace Steven's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." I thought I would double-down on Stevens' poem. If he could poeticize 13 ways of looking at a mere bird, I could certainly come up with 26 ways of looking at a software that allowed humans to tweet like birds.

And from 26 to 52--the number of playing cards in a deck, minus the jokers--seemed to give ample padding. I could write 26 tweets on how to use Twitter for teaching & learning, and another 26 around them about the reasoning process of why those 26 ways--and not some others.

And so began a presentation tweeting about Twitter.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Why Learning Is the Next Big Thing.

2012-01-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

If it wasn't evident before, it will soon be very apparent: learning is the center of our economy.

Why? Capitalism is about change. Karl Marx said it. Capitalism requires:

constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society....Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish [Marx's] epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air....

Very poetic. Now we call it "innovation," and we have a love affair with it.

Change has been the norm since we were "modern." Call it The Enlightenment. Call it the Age of Revolutions. But for a rather long time, we have been innovating: making things new. Brighter minds than mine have written about this.

And these changes drive the economy. This is very clear in the case of personal computers, the internet and mobile computing.

In the past, it was claimed that computers drove the economy by making us "more efficient." In fact, it always seemed to me more likely that people were simply forced to buy computers, to buy more computers, to buy new computers, to buy computers more often.

And to buy routers and IT personnel and web site builders.

The effect seems to be intensifying. Jobs are outsourced. Economic cycles of boom and bust, once thought "tamed" by a Great Moderation, are still with us. The recent downturn is one of the sharpest of the last 100 years.

Companies change. They come and go. Now it seems that an American company cannot make money selling photographic film, paper and equipment.

We all know very well of the impact of all this change on our lives: the suffering, those sidelined, the destruction of goods, the disappearance of whole careers and ways of living.

But we need also to recognize that change spells learning.

Hardware changes. Software changes. Business methods change. Product lineups change. And change spells training and re-training: training on the new tools, the new software, the new methods, to sell the new products, to give new services.

In business, change is now the norm, not the exception.

Normal Change means that every single person who wants to work must be constantly learning. We can never be "done" with learning. It is not enough to know our times tables and that "i" goes before "e" except after "c" (etcetera). If you cannot change, you can no longer work. Many of us have seen this up close & personal.

Has anyone reading this not changed jobs in the last ten years?
Even if you have the same job, do you perform the same tasks?
Don't you know at least one person who changed careers?
Businesses that are gone?
Or did not exist before but do now?

We are not only outsourced and downsized. We are old-sourced and new-sized.

All this suggests that the single most important industry of the future is learning.

Everyone will be constantly learning new skills. Some of this learning will take place in the workplace--where it used to be called "training."

Some will be done by universities. But universities are already seeing their role under fire. Businesses, employers and managers realize that learning cannot stop at college, and work cannot magically pause to wait for people to earn advanced degrees. It's not hard to see what will happen.

Universities and colleges will be downsized.
Learning will replace training.
Learning will take place everywhere. Learning will be in strip malls and in community centers and in the workplace and on websites and on e-readers and on smart phones and tablets.

Whoever finds a way to make learning quick, effective, efficient, enjoyable and cheap will dominate the future. Because our future is learning.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Should You Become Textbook-Agnostic?

2012-01-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

College courses often have a textbook. Not a reader or a compilation of articles but a textbook proper:

a single book,
published expressly for the purpose,
which gathers together key concepts and information,
summarized and organized for easy digestion.

I will confess: I have never liked most textbooks. To my mind, if you're not willing to stand behind what you say, if you pass the buck and pose yourself as merely repeating another's ideas, I'm unlikely to find what you say very valuable. To me, the way the person writing shapes what is said is one of the most important elements of writing. Without that, everything's a repair manual.

Sometimes a textbook is needed--but not as often as people think. There are a couple of strong reasons for not choosing a textbook on your students' behalf.

Textbooks are expensive. Textbooks aren't just casually expensive: they're expensive on purpose. Textbook publishing is not a small enterprise.

With 18 million college students currently enrolled spending $900 per student on textbooks, that's a $16 billion market. New editions come out frequently, because publishers don't get enough money from the used textbook market. (Some think electronic textbooks would be better--others not: in terms of what I'm saying here, they have the same issues.)

In theory, a textbook should facilitate learning. But learning is not one-size-fits-all. There are many learning goals. What you do for a textbook should fit your learning goals.

Textbooks can make students passive. A single authorized source deprives students of the opportunity to learn important skills:

finding relevant information,
determining which sources are more credible,
comparing information from multiple sources.

These skills make sense in both introductory and upper-level courses. If your is a course where these skills are important, you would be better off without a textbook. Or, more precisely, you might be better off being textbook-agnostic or crowd-sourcing your textbook.

Textbook-agonisticism derives its meaning from device-agonisticism:

We are device-agnostic when we let people use whatever computer hardware they like.

Netflix is becoming increasingly device-agnostic: you can watch it on your Playstation, your computer, your iPad, your Amazon Kindle Fire, etc.

Similarly, we are textbook-agnostic when we do not concern ourselves what resources the students use.

Instead we concern ourselves with the skills the students practice and the goals they reach.

Textbook-agnosticism could take many forms.

Give students a range of choices.

Be clear that you will not be providing page numbers, only pointing them to topics, and they must find the information themselves.
Help structure self-forming groups so students can support each other.
Consider giving points or credit to encourage selfless peer-supporting behavior.
Explain to students the goal and invite them to choose their own resources.
Make discussing, sharing, evaluating and finding useful resources a core part of the course.

I am currently doing this for an online screenwriting course.
Students must examine three books on the topic and share relevant findings.
The college bookstore has three books students can use--but they can also choose their own.
No limits are placed on what counts and does not. But the topics and goals form bright lines.
Students are rewarded for sharing information with each other. Often students can 'hear' what a peer says in a way they cannot 'hear' what an instructor says--whether for generational reasons, because of status, or for some other reasons.

Crowd-source the textbook.

Based on the syllabus, reward students for gathering information that can serve as resources for each part of the course.
Make a core part of the course discussions about what makes some resources more authoritative or valuable than others.
Give multiple criteria and help students practice evaluating resources.
This is especially useful if students will do research projects where they will need to use these skills.

In short, there are many ways of flying without a single, approved textbook.

But when ought you to use a textbook?

If your subject has competing frameworks, each textbook is imbued with one framework or method, and you only want the students to know one framework, then yes, use a single textbook.
When definitions of key terms vary enough from scholar to scholar that it would impede communication to have each student use the vocabulary differently.
If you think one book, for instance, treats irregular verbs in a far superior way to the others. (Your students' experience should reflect this, too. It may be your opinion, but it may not be accurate.)
When the field changes rapidly and outdated knowledge would significantly hinder student progress without giving them any particular advantage. E.g., it may be no use for students to know about a discredited theory.

But if none of these apply to you, and you want your students to practice these rich skills of evaluating and discussing resources together, textbook-agonisticism could be your new best friend.

--Edward R. O'Neill

26 Ways of Using Twitter for Teaching & Learning - #meta

2012-01-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

At 10:00 am PST on 1/5/12, I will be giving a presentation entitled "26 Ways of Using Twitter for Teaching & Learning."

The catch is, I will be 'giving' it entirely on Twitter.

The presentation consists entirely of 52 tweets.

Please consider joining me.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Google-izing Online Learning.

2011-12-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

Recently, I wrote about the emerging social learning platforms--and why they are all a bust.

In short, I said that learning requires tasks, criteria and a curriculum. That is: there must be tasks in a sequence, and each task needs criteria that define success or failure. At a minimum, learners need to know: "Am I succeeding or failing?" And after they know that, they can learn a degree of mastery--"How can I do a bit better?"

Already you can guess why so much teaching transfers so poorly to the web. Professors are experts with vast quantities of rich information and complex ideas at their fingertips. So a terrific professor is apt to tell you the twelve things wrong with your work--rather than simply "You're on the right track, but head a bit more in this direction." And it's the latter communication learners really need: right track/wrong track, steps for improvement.

So if learning is to transfer successfully to the internet--how? What special role could software play? What kind of software?

Again, I've already suggested that to transfer learning here or there, you need to think "learning how" and not just 'learning in general."

And this brings us to how the current social learning platforms get learning wrong.

It's true that a curriculum is a sequence of tasks. It may involve resources like books or web sites or videos. The Khan Academy seems to believe--wrongly, I think, and I can prove it--that a series of videos and online quizzes make up a curriculum. If you believe this is right, go watch a video and take the corresponding quiz and see if you learn what's in the video. An eight-minute lecture of a whiteboard capture or an interview no more causes learning to happen than a classroom lecture. It may, but it may as likely not.

A list of videos and some quizzes does not a curriculum make. It might, if the learner were prepared and the degree of feedback on the quizzes were tuned to the learner's level. And it also might if there were practice that helped you get it right. But that's not where we are yet.

The thing software could really get right is the sequencing of tasks in the curriculum.

The flip side of the "social" web is not just sharing ratings with friends: it's crowd-sourcing. That is the secret behind Google's phenomenal early success. Every other search engine wanted either to individually evaluate web sites or to jigger the search rankings by taking money from web sites to put their url higher in the search results. Google refused to do this.

Google observed that when they returned search results, those results were on their own page. And Google therefore knew which of the results uses clicked on. Therefore Google's own traffic showed them which results were better--and could be fed back into the search algorithm.

That's it. That's why Google was better than the search engines you've forgotten about--like Lycos.

And that's why a web-based curriculum will be as good as the size of its user base.

If a curriculum is a series of sequenced tasks with matching criteria, a web-based repository of tasks could collect what educational researchers today only dream of. Namely, such a web site could capture the exact likelihood of a learner performing better on Task B after performing Task A.

That is the heart of a curriculum: the likelihood of performing better on one task after performing another task. That is a curriculum: a sequence of tasks arranged so that success on one task makes success on the next task more likely rather than less. If you're not doing that, you're just frustrating learners with obstacles--because any task that does not improve learning is an obstacle, and it more likely demotivates than motivates.

The rest is a statistical nicety to be debated by stats wonks. (And the company with the best stats wonks will win--another Google Takeaway.)

In short, online learning tasks need to be Google-ized: ranked by effectiveness.

The rest of the details of a good social learning platform could be inferred from other examples. But I'll blog more about that later.

In the meantime, I think the idea of a self-adjusting system that ranks tasks (with clear success criteria attached) is enough for one day.

--Edward R. O'Neill

So-Called Social Learning Platforms

2011-12-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

Truly the phrase "social learning" is a bit like the phrase "wet water." I personally don't recall attending school alone. Yes, we did homework alone. Anything else was called "cheating"; nowadays it's called "collaboration."

But most of the time I was in school, I was in groups. We attended lectures as a group. We had discussions as a group. We had partners in labs. We did projects in groups.

This was not because we were lemmings. You watched fellow students make mistakes you would not, and you felt better that you were a bit ahead of the game. And you watched fellow students make mistakes you would have made--and you quaked a bit inside that you were Not Getting It.

Yes, people learn in part from watching. Learning is social. Some reading and drills can be done alone: go to a library, and you'll see students doing this. But much learning is social. So much learning is social that there's little point in calling some learning "social"--as if to imply there's some "non-social" learning. (At the exact historical moment when some people are obsessed with the brain and its role in learning, others are insisting on networks rather than brains.)

But the phrase "social learning" is not going away. And it underlines something important and connects with major trends, so we need to make our peace.

Almost every web site now needs a social dimension. This means: I don't just listen to music or buy things; I rate songs and artists, share my ratings, view my friends' ratings, meet new friends through their ratings and reviews. And the same goes for buying things. I can announce to my social networks what I just bought--or hide the fact, and of course getting the sharing/privacy part wrong is the big pitfall.

On the one hand, all this truly makes one long for the days when listening to music or reading a magazine was a blessedly solitary affair. You listened to music alone because it would be rude to listen to music while with others. (Ahem.) You complained about your new toaster to the air, your wife or anyone within earshot at work.

Now online social learning platforms are beginning to bubble up. Most 'social learning platforms' get it wrong. Giving people a wiki no more makes social learning happen than giving pens makes people writers, giving them whisks makes them cooks, or giving them bongo's makes them musicians.

But social learning happens. It is real. People learn by watching others. People learn by hearing stories of others' learning experiences. People learn by formulating and sharing their own stories. That's three ways learning can be "social" in a non-trivial sense.

But what does a social learning platform look like?

We've all been in one: it's called a classroom. Or if you've been to a line dancing group, you did some social learning. You watched others, tried it yourself, got feedback, gave pointers where you could.

Try joining a writer's group, and you'll see how it works. Nothing magical happens there--except learning. People share their work. You see others practicing their craft. Writers get feedback and give feedback. And you learn from all these: what other writers do well and poorly, what other writers believe is good feedback, what you experience as good feedback. That's the heart of the matter. It works.

Emerging social learning platforms we're seeing now are a bust for three reasons: tasks, criteria, curriculum. There's no learning without tasks. If you can't perform a task at the end of the learning process, a task you couldn't do before or couldn't do as well, there's no demonstrable learning.

You can go to a writer's group forever and learn to make some very clever comments. But until you pick up the pen and try to write a sentence, no one can say whether or not you can write. (Another remarkable thing about writer's groups: often pretty much everyone agrees 'this is good,' even when their own style or goals are different.)

So a meaningful curriculum is a series of tasks with criteria. Barring this, no social learning platform can really do anything meaningful. They're all just a blackboard and some chalk--and no one ever called a blackboard and chalk "a social learning platform."

Admittedly, this is where our K-12's are having problems. A pencil-and-paper test with multiple choice questions has become the only benchmark for demonstrating learning. Basically, when someone comes up with better, more nuanced tasks, tasks that are interesting, involving and even social, tasks that both help make learning happen and demonstrate it, and when there is a back end to track task performance, the pencil-and-paper tests that educators hate so much--partly for the right reasons--will be history.

As to what such a curriculum or software would be like, that will have to wait for another blog post.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Introductions in the Syllabus-Free Course

2011-12-22T09:52:00.000-08:00

The other day, I introduced the idea of Introductions. (What follows was originally part of that post--which I decided was too long to chew up in one sitting.)

Introductions are short things. They could be prose or images or something else. (Mightn't an Introduction to Beethoven have a few tunes in it?)

Introductions introduce a topic, idea or thing by giving some locating information. Introductions answer the question: "Where the heck does this thing sit in the network of stuff I might know about?"

For instance, I might like an introduction to:

Belgium,
Heidegger,
object-oriented programming,
chaos theory,
20th-century American poetry,
theories of management.

Introductions could be a nice form & format for higher education. Higher ed desperately needs to go beyond the term paper, research paper, lab report, five-paragraph essay and Powerpoint presentation. New forms might include: the timeline, the small database, and the Introduction.

Hence Introductions could fit some neat pedagogical purposes: they wouldn't just be resources, they could be tasks. Indeed, in the framework of a course, it couldn't take that long to generate some decent introductions.

I sometimes advocate to teachers--in part purely for the purpose of raising some issues--the notion of the Syllabus-Free Course. That is: what if college courses did not have that defensive document saying what the course would and would not address, what books were trustworthy authorities on the subject, what fit within the field and what did not.

You are taking a course on English Literature. What the heck does the title mean? When I taught in an actual classroom, I used to call the first day "Explaining the Course Title" or "Reading the Syllabus." The syllabus usually sets the student straight on what the course title means: a syllabus is basically a title and then an explanation of its meaning.

Textbooks also shut down a lot of questioning. The Who-za-me Anthology of English Literature has decided what's fit to go inside. But in screening things in and out, the whole definitional process of the discipline is lost--whereas it should be core to what students learn. The idea shouldn't be "English Studies" is perfect as it is: it should be

What if students were asked to find out what was and wasn't included in this topic? To present definitions and debate them? The instructor could be an expert and could talk about why literature in English but not from England made up the field. The students could propose ways of slicing the topic that would be most interesting.

Introductions could be a wonderful part of such a course. (In this sense, Introductions are more of a tool in an arsenal than an end-in-themselves.)

Go break the course title down into some parts, you would in effect say to the students. How is a course called "Statistics" not just a math course? Why is it taught in a Psychology Department? What are the Big Things People Do With this "statistics" thing-a-me?

If courses used this strategy, a course on the novel could separate it from the epic--but only partially--and then dive into big novelists and kinds, and along the way students could find: "Jane Austen is what I care about in this whole Novel Game"--or Nabakov or Thackeray, for that matter.

Requirements could spell out how many parents and children and siblings and parts the Introduction should include. The "parents" and "children" are the predecessors and inheritors in a tree; the siblings are items that are similar-but-not-the-same; the parts are--well, just that. So:

How many novelists "begat" Nabokov? How many "influenced" novelists should be included?
How many similar novelists would be useful to locate VN?
How many of VN's novels need we know about to get a good picture?

(Indeed, a clever system might store this kind of information in such a way that users could get only as much or little as they liked.)

I actually think a lot of Introductions could be built up relatively quickly--and then re-used--by just a few courses in each department.

And then everyone in the world could access these Introductions to find their own way.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Introducing Introductions

2011-12-21T14:08:00.000-08:00

I have often been frustrated by the lack of a good introduction.

I like flipping through catalogs of catalogs. We all do. Amazon.com is a good example. What is it? A ton of books containing a ton of information. So it's information about information.

In the movie Annie Hall, the Woody Allen-character relates a joke about two old folks in a home. "The food here is terrible," says one. The other replies: "Yes, and such small portions!" Nowadays with information, it's just the opposite: such large portions.

It's been that way for a long time. Go into any library and you'll get lost pretty quickly. There's a lot of sections with a lot of books, and each book contains a lot of stuff--including references to other books. I remember distinctly that the first dozen times I walked into a library, I made a tour of the whole place--and then left. I couldn't find a thing.

Finding things is important: being able to find things. If you leave school and can't find anything--because it was all provided to you, plunked on your desk, shoved into your hands, crammed into your eyes and ears--you really did not learn something very important that everyone needs to know.

The other day I was flipping through a catalog of college courses on DVD and tape. All of calculus or Western philosophy or quasars or neutrino's--in twelve lectures or 24 or 36 lectures. I confess I own several of these already. I've never gotten past the first lecture. Call me ADHD--oh look, a bird is flying past as I type this! But the point is: introducing a topic does not require this much detail: it requires something else.

We live in a culture of experts. There is so much information, and the only way to Be Somebody is to become an expert. We're drowning in experts--when we could really use some good amateurs. That's what good journalists are: good amateurs. That guy at Berkeley who writes about food is that. He goes and tries to find out stuff, and then he tells you about it, and it's interesting, and you can follow it, and you're not drowning in it. Really: the guy has a gift. He can boil what he knows about food--which is a lot--down to sixty pages.

Brevity is a good thing. Not shallowness and not compression but just brevity. What you really want to know is: just enough so you can find out more. Brevity clarifies. Brevity nourishes. Brevity excites. Brevity intrigues.

I really wish our culture had more brief introductions.

A good introduction is a short one. "John, this is Albert. Albert this is John. Albert works in a hospital like you do, John, but in Calgary rather than San Jose. John went to Occidental, and you want to Pomona, so maybe you can swap stories. And you're both married to Swedes." That's a good introduction.

Introductions are more about where than what. Where is this? Introductions connect, situate and locate along lines and in networks that are important. This is this kind of a person from this kind of a place with this kind of connections to the past and the present and to other people. That's really what the titles in personal introductions do: "This is Dr. John Sussmann, Associate Director of the Marlin Group." Now I know a bunch about John based on his title, his name, his job, and where he works.

But little introduction are now rather big. There's a nice series of books called "A Very Short Introduction To...." And then it's idealism in 90 pages. Or Derrida. Or Genomics.

Wikipedia is really a set of introduction. One lovely thing about them is how they're connected. One can lead to another. If it's an award winner, you find out who won the award the year before and after. That's context. That's part of introducing.

But even Wikipedia can be overlong--as introductions go. (Brief introductions are good introductions.)

There used to be some nice introductions. There was a wonderful 'invitation' to sociology. It was short, and any literate high school graduate could could read it with pleasure. Look at the Amazon.com reviews, and you'll find many who recall it with great fondness. But the introduction or invitation was killed off by the massive textbook tome. This contains everything you never wanted to know about X--and were quite rightly afraid to ask.

So when I want to learn about something, here's the kind of thing I'd like to know.

What the heck is it? What kind of thing is it?
What does it do? What does it accomplish? How is it used?
Where did it come from? What did it lead to? So what came before and after?
What else is like it--but not the same thing?
How big is it? How many parts does it have?
What do people argue about it?

These are actually semantic concepts and relations. What is it called? What are synonyms and antonyms? Aristotle offered his own list. (Of course: Aristotle loved lists. He'd be on my list of list-lovers.) You can find many good discussions--but of course, they're too long. But many others have chimed in--although the field of semantic relations is nowhere near as organized as you'd think it would be.

To my mind, an ideal introduction would be somewhere between a few sentences and a page. But is prose even the best medium? A nicely configured database might allow us to store items with explanations and relationships in a form that could then be browsed by whomever could build the best interface. This seems to be The Way Things Are Going. Yes, Amazon has a store, but it's really a bunch of data about products. And if someone else can create a nicer way to browse it, so be it. (The information is fed out through something called an API, if you're into tech stuff.)

It seems to me some basic semantic concepts that would locate stuff in relation to other stuff would be:

kind
name/title
scope & magnitude
parents & children: where did it come from & what did it lead to?
siblings: things that are similar-and-different
internal parts
debates

These aren't too fussy, but I hope they're not too broad, either. The point is that each semantic dimension is a kind of road or avenue bringing us to meanings--like addresses.

--Edward R. O'Neill

P.S. This post was formerly longer, but I migrated the latter half to another post--on how Introductions fit into the Syllabus-Free Course.

Projecting Your iPad in the Classroom.

2011-12-05T10:42:00.000-08:00

So you want to show your class what's happening on your iPad? There are a few things you need to know to display your iPad screen on an LCD, flatscreen or data projector.

You Must Adapt.

First, you will need an adapter. It’s an Apple product, so there is more than one type. (Ahem.)

The most common is: VGA. This is the most common type of connection between computers and external screens or projectors.
Less common is HDMI. It's less common, but it carries sound as well as picture.

Are You Enabled?

HDMI will project everything on the iPad: the ‘desktop,’ the Safar web browser, ebooks, everything.
Though the VGA interface is more common, what it projects is more limited.

Displaying to an external device from the iPad using VGA is enabled at the level of the app. Some apps are, and some apps aren’t.

Which Apps Are Enabled?

Some of the most important apps you can display using a VGA connection are:

Videos*
Youtube*
Keynote ($)
Photos (in slideshow mode only)*
GoodReader ($)
Brushes and other drawing/whiteboard apps ($)

* = Preloaded in the iPad Operating System.

($) = not free

Sounding Off

If you want sound, you'll also need an audio cable.

The most common type is "headphone mini male to headphone mini male." If you have earphones, this cable will look like the earphone plug--but at both ends.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Using Dropbox To Share Teaching Materials

2011-10-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

A professor wrote to me recently to ask about using Dropbox to share teaching materials. I replied as follows.

There are a number of factors that affect the use of Dropbox--and implications that follow from using it.

First, it is unwise and against most university polices to store student grades or other sensitive data on 'the cloud.' Some policies demand that student grades be protected with encryption, and Dropbox does not offer this.

FERPA-protected information like social security numbers should not be stored on systems like Dropbox. I am not a lawyer, but I would assume that the disability status of individuals is similarly confidential, so I would strongly advised against discussing particular individuals in files shared on the cloud--or via non-university email.

If, however, you are 'merely' sharing teaching materials, these concerns arguably do not apply.

Dropbox is very popular amongst professors: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/dropbox-edu/33911 A professional educational technology called Educause has some brief advice about using these services: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7073.pdf But this advice is (mercifully) brief and hence leaves out many pesky details.

If you create a single account (e.g., "mycollegeromancelanguageprofs"), then you will not know who posted what, and any single user could accidentally delete everything.

I would therefore argue that the best practice is: for individual users to sign up for separate accounts. Conceptually, participating instructors can think of every item as existing twice--once as their own work product, and then a second time as filed by topic, level, etc.

In short,

Francesca may share a quiz on the past tense, and a handout on literary devices.
Gianni may share a handout on pronouns and a quiz on Pirandello.
A helpful person might then copy the files to folders on: grammar: verbs, pronouns, etc; literature: devices, authors, etc.
Francesca may create a shared folder organized by topic, whereas Gianni might want to create folders organizing by course.
Since users cannot control each others' behaviors, a good philosophy might be to 'let a thousand flowers bloom.' (In the absence of rigid taxonomies, 'folksonomies' are useful. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy )

Some implications follow from using Dropbox in this way.

To share a folder with others, each user would need a list of participating instructors' emails. This would only need to be done once, but (so far as I know) every time a new instructor wanted to participate, every user would have to add that user. Here is information on sharing: http://www.dropbox.com/help/19
Participating instructors would need to be clear about workflow. Namely, each instructor could create a shared folder, but other instructors would have to know NOT to delete or alter these files.
Some user will MOVE files rather than COPYING them, so SOMEONE needs how to sign into Dropbox and restore deleted files.
If there is no clear or simple way to alert people "hey, I shared a new file on topic X," a certain amount of poking around and looking at dates might be helpful. I cannot think of a clear method here, so if you do, please tell me.
One workflow would then be: for instructors to share files bearing their own names, to label documents clearly. Anyone interested in doing so could then copy the files over to shared folders organized by topic, concept, difficulty level, etc.--e.g., first year, second year, grammar, style, literature, etc.

This web page has the best tips I have seen (and I have browsed 50 pages on the topic): http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16310/user-guide-to-dropbox-shared-folders/

Using Dropbox to share teaching materials has some complexities, but it is a step up from emailing individual files.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Seven Simple Ways To Lower Attrition Rates in Online Courses.

2011-07-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

Someone is finally saying in print what those of us who teach online for community colleges have known for some time.

Attrition rates for online courses are high--very high.

In our culture's frenzied love affair with all things digital and mediated--some things really are pleasant to do while at home on the couch in our PJ's--it is worth noting that face-to-face presence exerts a kind of social pressure.

When a student shows up to class, he may well feel (quite rightly) that he should kind of do the homework, as the professor might call on him. Call it fear. Call it a stressor. But it's real.

Thus the simple fact of needing to show up at a given place and time, together with the fear of embarrassment, produce a beneficial effect: a student does some work.

Absent this pressure, it's quite easy to forget about the class entirely.

Okay: admittedly some face-to-face students are quite capable of forgetting about those classes entirely, too. But that's another story.

Those of us who teach online--as I have for the last five years--develop strategies, and institutions do the same. Here are seven simple ways to lower the attrition rates in online courses.

Enroll all DL students in an orientation towards the learning management system--and towards DL itself.
The first week of class, orient students clearly towards tasks and deadlines.
The instructor should contact students individually during the first two weeks of the course to make them feel involved and recognized. Say something individual to each student to make a connection and to show you recognize her experiences and contributions. "Mary--Just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed reading your Discussion post. I haven't had that kind of experience, and I know your peers will get a lot out of your participation in this class. Thanks for sharing your thoughts."
Re-orient students each week with motivating, substantive emails about the week's course content. "Have you ever wished on a falling star? What causes falling stars? This week you'll learn where falling stars come from...."
Advise students quickly and honestly about progress. Be firm and clear without being mean or negative.
In formative assessment, give specific Next Steps students can take to improve. "The sentences you write are on the topic. But I would like next time for you to group them together in one paragraph: so don't hit 'Return' after every sentence."
Direct at-risk students towards resources which are also available at a distance. "My friend Mona Simpson in the Learning Center looks at student drafts Tuesday's and Thursday's--in person or by email. Why don't you drop by? She's very nice. Ask her about the Celtics."

In short: englobe the student in a social network that aims to be as encompassing as that in which we try to put on a clean shirt so the cute guy who sits in the back won't think we're scum.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Why Not Just Make a Web Site?

2011-07-08T16:52:00.000-07:00

A very smart manager of web services asked me this recently, and I thought this was a great question.

The question can also be flipped: many web sites could just as well be ebooks--they are updated so infrequently.

So indeed, what is the profile of a web site vs. an ebook? It would nice for those of us who work with learning technology to know--so that we can help users decide what kind of content should go on what platform. So this was my attempt at a rough-and-ready set of distinctions.

A web site can:

be dynamic (responding to users), frequently changing, regularly updated;
be a hosted conversation, not a fixed monologue or dialogue: it's like a play where the audience talks back;
collect data about users to track them over time--for their benefit or the site's benefit;
immediately connect to other resources via hyperlinks so that the site is seamlessly embedded within the internet as a whole;
be accessed sequentially over a long period, but brief and intermittent random access, skimming, searching and hit-and-run browsing are often assumed.

An ebook:

takes a fixed form which can be stable for weeks or months or more;
does not include an on-going conversation--that takes place elsewhere;
does not track user behavior (though some reader programs sync across devices for user convenience);
contains within itself a tightly-bound group of coherent elements and may link more loosely to other resources (through footnotes, hyperlinks and other references);
is a standalone resource that can be used, read and enjoyed by itself, often over a long duration, often sequentially.

In short: a web site is a snack or a buffet, where an ebook is a meal or several meals.

A web site is potentially casual, sampled in short visits, potentially over time, in a very non-linear fashion, and it may be a form of social interaction.
An ebook has a longer duration, may be more sequential, and it is a solitary 'conversation' between an author and a reader.

The ebook characteristics in italics are traditional book characteristics. In the era of the web site, we are apt to think of all collections of information as very loosely related. Everything's connected to everything--right? It's all just hypertext.

But in the era of hypertext, the success of the ebook should remind us of a few things--four, really.

That some pieces of information are more tightly bound to each other.
That kind of tight binding or coherence is what we expect of an author or content creator.
That not everyone is connected to the web at every moment--nor wants to be nor should be expected to be.
And that social as we are, we still enjoy solitary, reflective activities--as we have since Gutenberg's invention gave a reasonable price to solitary reading for enlightenment or pleasure.

--E. R. O'Neill

Applying Mind/Brain Principles?

2011-04-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

I was recently looking over the notes I took after reading 12 Brain/Mind Learning Principles in Action by Caine, Caine and two others.

While this book has its touch-y-feel-y aspects, there are many good ideas. Indeed, I found that the principles in Caine, Caine et al jibed amazingly well with Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do.

In my notes I synthesized them down to ten or so points.

Get the learner relaxed.

This can involve things like: clear communication about expectations, short assignments.
Assignments that involve contributing or sharing experiences can lower the learner’s stress, while also providing fodder for meaningful discussion later.

Give the learner a challenge--but not too much.

This implies knowing what the student can do. You can give a pre-test, quiz.
Or you can even give a ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ test--e.g., asking students to write about themselves and then noting who can write a paragraph, who has spelling problems, etc.

Crank down threats and fatigue and things that make students feel helpless.

So: don’t overwork the student. Give clear feedback. Communicate clearly about deadlines.
Rewarding the student for submitting work on time, for instance, helps the student feel she has control over her performance.

Get the learners to interact socially.

Social interaction is a motivation, and it has lower stress than interacting with a forbidding instructor.

Encourage the learner to search for meaning that's important to her.
Immerse the learner in a complex but clear and structured task.

It can be a ‘Where’s Waldo?’
Or it can be finding something meaningful based on her own experiences within a significantly complex whole--such as an essay or a textbook chapter.

Give her ways of grasping wholes and not just a dizzying array of minute tidbits.

E.g., demonstrate a clear pattern and then ask students to recognize that pattern in small examples.

Promote pattern recognition.

Keep using the same pattern or configuration--a loop in a computer program, an irregular verb, “causes of Expressionism”--so the student knows what to look for.

Give the student ways to actively process information with concrete tasks (list, re-arrange, draw, map, etc.).

The point is not the beauty of the results: indeed, you needn’t grade on quality, only meeting minimal assignment requirements.
The point is for the student to put the information into working memory and build connections.

Guide each learner to create her own unique knowledge-map.

The important thing is to do and make the map--not that it’s the map you would make for yourself.

A good course design brings these all together. Yes, the devil is in the details. But it can be done, and Bain's book provides fine models.

--Edward R. O'Neill

TEDxUSC: Annotated Tweet Curation - Themes & Selective Summary

2011-04-14T11:02:00.001-07:00

A How-To How To

I already gathered my livetweets about TEDxUSC, made a screenshot and tweeted it:

My summary of yesterday's #TEDxUSC event: http://yfrog.com/h7rf8p http://yfrog.com/h8arbp Thnx http://quoteurl.comless than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

And I also had to tweet how I did that:

This lets you grab tweets, put them in a window. http://www.quoteurl.com/ This lets you capture that window: http://tinyurl.com/ko36tgless than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

Meta-tweeting? Meta-meta-tweeting?

But I also wanted to annotate these tweets.

It's amazing/ridonkulous that you can't just search & pull all the tweets you want, and then wrap a commentary/discussion around them.

But there it is. Twitter is still evolving.

There is, however, a tool for embedding the tweets in a blog: http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/

So that's what I did below: pulled my and others' tweets together and annotated a tiny bit.

This is not a complete discussion of the event, just some highlights--with links.

(And if you want to see another Tweet summary, check out one of the best livetweeters there: snidelyhazel. I also mention coachkays below, so here are his #TEDxUSC tweets.)

Big Themes.

Participation. Getting involved feels good.
Help others. This feels good, too. It's not square. There's some new impulse towards altruism. Maybe after the Great Recession, we understand its value more.
Doing and making. These feel good, too. And it needn't be digital, electronic, computerized or 2.0.
Re-use, economize, invent. It's not only ecological to re-use, it's smart, requires smartness, and can help others.
Value. What do we value? Who creates it? Who gets to share in it? Our society seems to be going back to fundamentals here.

Talks, Performances, Movies

I was worried before the event started: they lost my registration, and people were tweeting about their VIP status (which I tried to parody).

FYI When #TEDxUSC loses your registration, you have to wait 30 minutes. Thnx.less than a minute ago via Twitter for Android Favorite Retweet Replyedwardoneill
edwardoneill

Generic brag about seating and/or status at #TEDxUSC --from my iPad....less than a minute ago via HootSuite Favorite Retweet Replyedwardoneill
edwardoneill

(And I wasn't the only one whose registration was lost.)

RT @tastyjules #tedxusc is a major clusterfuck. Event crew shmoozing as at 30 ppl w orchestra seats relegated to 2nd balcony. #disappointedless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet Replyedwardoneill
edwardoneill

"Oh no," I thought: "another way for people to feel superior."

But that quickly went away.

Steve Connell did a wonderful monologue: a memory of learning from his mom and dad, their insights and hardships, that superheroes fight everyday struggles--including and especially to help others.

RT @snidelyhazel: Steve Connell: "The fight starts when you leave the phone booth as Clark Kent." #TEDxUSCless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

Whom do we lionize?
Whom do we revere?
Billionaires because they are billionaires?
Or when they create value and connect people--no matter how much they earn?

(Warning: if you go to his personal web site, you get re-routed to some media-heavy page that takes forever to load and may well crash your browser. Be forewarned.)

The session quickly moved to a sing-along: basically the room got divided into parts and taught some harmony.

Auditory proof WE are better than me. RT @edwardoneill A sing-a-long? Really? #TEDxUSCless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

This underlined a running themes: social action, doing things and doing them together, participation, a greater good.

On this topic, Jose Antonio Rosa talked about the poorest people in the world not as an emerging market (as I first thought he was saying) but as inventors and creators of value.

Scavengers scavenge to CREATE and INNOVATE to fill real needs. #TEDxUSC J. A. Rosaless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

Pomona basketball coach Brian Kays (among the best live-tweeters on the premises) insightfully pointed to the less-is-more aspect of this talk. We are so distracted by technology and newness that we collapse the two. What if the greatest invention used rubber bands and bailing wire?

RT @coachkays: The poor are producing the beat DIY innovation around as they don't have the advantage of tech, results are astounding #T ...less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

Rosa also underlined the importance of hope: that without hope there is no creativity. Hope may be a delusion, but it is a healthy one.

RT @derekfromson: Biz prof Jose Antonio Rosa (University of Wyoming): "Hope allows us to engage in healthy delusion and creative devianc ...less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

(He also pointed out that creativity can be illegal, violent and inimical, too: this wasn't a greeting card.)

USC professor Josh Kun (casually dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt) talked about music and borders--notably our border with Mexico.

Most interesting, I thought, was his description of deejay parties where participants can have the deejay shout out the names of distant (even dead or missing) loved ones--then buy a CD of the shout-out.

At the Solidaro Party, the DJ shouts out to your loved ones. You get the CD and send it across the border to your loved ones. #TEDxUSCless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet Replyedwardoneill
edwardoneill

Maybe I spelled the name of this kind of party wrong. Kun called them 'transnational messaging events':

RT @RickyHang: Sonidera parties allow transmission of messages to those across borders- basically transnational messaging events - Josh ...less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet Replyedwardoneill
edwardoneill

Rick Nahmias from Food Forward explained how gleaning unpicked backyard fruit could feed our hungriest, notably farm workers who themselves are poorly paid--fruitanthropy.

Rick Nahmias talks about the 1.1 million CA farm workers who feed our whole country. #TEDxUSCless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet Replyedwardoneill
edwardoneill

California farm workers earn $11k per year, feed the country, but can barely feed themselves. #TEDxUSCless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet Replyedwardoneill
edwardoneill

Rick Nahmias gleans fruit and food for the hungry. They've harvested over 1 million servings of food. #TEDxUSCless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet Replyedwardoneill
edwardoneill

This is also a tax deduction for the homeowner!

Rick N. called it win-win-win-win: food pantries get food that's fresh and wholesom, homeowners get a tax break, volunteers participate, and hungry people get fed.

(Where is our next Cesar Chavez, I wonder?)

One screening was a short film shot entirely on an iPhone4--and edited on it too (at least the rough cut).

RT @derekfromson: Watching "Apple of My Eye," a short film shot and edited entirely on iPhone4. Very cool! See it here: http://bit.ly/d4 ...less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

The fact of the technology produced more ooh's and ah's than the film, which is interesting. But I think this set up very powerfully the message: technology can lower the bar for skillful media content-creation.

Against the tendency to fetishize computer technology, Dale Dougherty showed actual physical objects--some even without batteries!

His "slides" were hand-made pieces of cardboard with letters cut out of them.

Dale Dougherty uses his own handmade slides--physical objects, not software. KEWL! #TEDxUSCless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

He used salty Play Dough to make electrical circuits, and he built up to using an Arduino processor.

These were low-tech but joyful devices. He sang the praises of simplicity, play, productivity and poverty, even.

Homemade Play-Do, musical instruments and rockets? Sing-a-long's? We are craving to make & participate at #TEDxUSC!less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

Behind social media, which can seem alienating and distancing, there is a deep desire to CONNECT. You could see it at TEDxUSC in the opening participatory sing-a-long.

Annenberg graduate Aram Sinnreich proposed the design requirements for a network that belongs to citizens, not phone providers or the government.

RT @derekfromson: MondoNet (http://mondonet.org), Aram Sinnreich's ad-hoc wireless mesh network, shows new approach to web connectivity ...less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

Jennifer Pahlka described a project in which programmers work for a year doing small projects for local government.

Code for America is like Teach for America--but for geeks. #TEDxUSC #redundant They develop apps for government/citizen use.less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

I could go on about this one for hours, so I'll have to make it a separate blog post.

Elisabeth Stock explained what a student-centered education looks like--including helping parents have a clear role and not expecting teachers to make learning appear from nowhere.

RT @snidelyhazel: Elisabeth Stock: Rethink digital learning through student-centered lens. Learning follows child, teacher and parents s ...less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

Her organization offers hundreds of digital assets for teachers, parents and kids to access.

RT @neilspears: Over 600 digital learning assets at http://t.co/6NPsgQd #TEDxUSC #CFY http://t.co/tM0a08sless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

And she told a charming story about a teacher realizing that play could be part of learning, not a distraction.

Elisabeth Stock tells a killer anecdote about teacher realizing a game can be a platform for learning. http://www.cfy.org/ #TEDxUSCless than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyLearning Technology
learningtech

This is the kind of 'a-ha' moment we need more of.

There was more. But I found these speakers and ideas very compelling.

--E. R. O'Neill

Does Reality Matter (for Higher Ed)?

2011-04-05T18:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterdays’ annual Pullias Lecture on higher education reminded me of Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

In that movie, Mia Farrow’s character falls in love with a handsome man who’s walked down off a movie screen. Farrow’s Cecilia is only a little put-off by her loved one not being entirely real. She tells her sister: “I’ve met the most wonderful man. He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”

At USC’s Pullias Lecture and discussion yesterday, James Gee and Henry Jenkins discussed gaming platforms and fan fiction as platforms for learning math and science (Gee) and political activism (Jenkins).

Jim Gee explained how some players in the game World of Warcraft set up complex experiments to analyze flaws in the statistical models behind the game.
Similarly, players of the game Portal master complex variations in the laws of physics to allow their fictional avatars to jump from one place to another through the game’s eponymous portals.
In his response, Henry Jenkins recounted the way some young people not only write their own Harry Potter novels, they actually become non-fictional political organizers around Potter-inspired values.

Let’s skip the question of “some” vs. “many.” These were inspiring anecdotal talks about the power of platforms quite unlike formal education to inspire passionate devotion to tasks requiring hard work and the acquisition and integration of powerful skills. I suspect the rate at which WOW players and Potter readers become stats experts or novelists is far lower than that of college graduates--but leave that be for now.

The question that nagged at me when I woke up the next day was: What do we think about becoming an “expert” on the laws of a physical universe or set of historical institutions that, strictly speaking, don’t exist? We still apparently believe that a kind of synthetic non-disciplinary expertise matters. But what if its basis--like the almost-perfect boyfriend in The Purpose Rose of Cairo--is fictional?

“I have the most wonderful theory: it’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”

A formalist defense of gaming and fiction as platforms for learning is not hard to imagine. ‘Well, physics and English and the tax code are all merely rules, and so any ability to master rules, respond and respond with strategies is educational, broadly speaking--and that at least some of these skills are transferable.’

Which is fine. But do we believe it?

The history of Western music offers an interesting analogy.

Since around 1600 composers and pedagogues centered in Europe believed that good music should follow rules drawn from in part from acoustics: tones have what are called overtones, and the overtones determine what was “consonant” and what was “dissonant.” Dissonance was permitted, but only under rigid conditions--basically to drive towards a tonal home and center. The ‘home-and-center’ part wasn’t anchored firmly in acoustics, but it had some taproots.

During the 19th century Romantic composers like Wagner drifted further and further from this logic of a voyage that started at home, went away and then returned. Then near the beginning of the 19th century something happened. Composers began to ignore acoustics and the old rules. Schoenberg, Berg and Webern ceased favoring some notes of the 12-tone scale over others: they set the 12 tones ‘free.’ Musical materials became a neutral substance on which to impose compositional patterns.

And this lead the way to composing music using helicopters and such. After all, “music” was no longer the substance: it was the organization, the pattern. So consonance ceased to matter--if you followed that particular theory, that is.

We all know what happened: classical music became wildly unpopular, the purview of the few, while popular music retained its ties with acoustics and traditional harmony. Aside from the addition of some extra notes (like the 7th note of the scale), many pop songs of today are perfectly comprehensible within the outlines of the common practice period. The music that paid attention to acoustics is still popular. And the music that forgot about acoustics is still revered by “experts”--but only by them.

But is that important? Should popularity and common wisdom trump specialized expert knowledge? If everyone who loves WOW or Harry Potter thinks you’re terrific, is that enough?

The example is on-point, because a part of Gee’s talk was dedicated towards hammering on the idea of disciplinary “experts”--Alan Greenspan was Gee’s example--while celebrating the virtue of “amateurs”--embodied by Darwin. (It could almost make you feel sorry for Yoda, I mean Greenspan.) “Experts” killed classical music, so why not abandon that kind of expertise?

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Economics may involve playing with an arbitrary set of man-made rules called laws. But the minimum number of calories a human being needs to survive is well known. And when your income doesn’t provide for those calories--or better, the required nutrients, since calories are now cheap--there’s a real danger of starvation or pellagra or the like.

Likewise, there’s nothing arbitrary about genetics: those who care about science tend to agree that Darwin discovered something about nature, not about arbitrary rules. (I’m leaving out those who think Darwin gave us ‘just a theory.’)

Reality is not just a game to be played and mastered. We underestimate reality when we treat it as such. Both Gee and Jenkins underline the collaborative and cooperative aspects of games and fan activities, so I can’t claim they are solely focused on strategic behavior: they’re not.

But it does seem cavalier to marginalize reality by treating science and politics as a man-made structures house-of-cards to be built or re-built willy-nilly. Were higher education to embrace arbitrariness, it’s hard not to foresee the old debates about relativism resurfacing all over again.

And that is not a movie I’d care to re-watch.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Will Instructure Become the WordPress/Drupal of the LMS?

2011-02-01T09:32:00.000-08:00

Instructure is an LMS (learning management system) that is genuinely Web 2.0--down to its roots.

It's new-ish, but it uses feeds and a Facebook-like landing page. AJAX-like page editing is built in, not grafted on as an afterthought.

And the interface is clean and intuitive.

Now Instructure has funding from Josh Coates, formerly of Mozy.

Should Blackboard, the big player in the higher-ed LMS arena, quake in its boots?

Let's think about it. There are two important things here.

One, Coates is an interesting and significant entrepreneur. Such people make mis-steps, but they're worth watching. And if Coates think this is a good move, that's worth noting.

Two, Instructure is shifting to an open source model. Their product is generationally different from Sakai, which has no meaningful design advantage over Blackboard (and Moodle is arguably weaker). Forthcoming versions of Sakai look to me only cosmetically different.

Hence there will be a genuinely web 2.0 LMS that is Open Source, and a company leveraging that software with powerful backing.

Should Blackboard quake in their boots? Maybe not. But those who admire both choice and the open source movement should send up a small cheer.

WordPress has been very successful in becoming the de facto publishing platform of choice for many bloggers. And open-source Drupal has become the basis for Acquia's services. Acquia tailors Drupal packages for free download, and they also offer hosting and customization services.

Leveraging all that free programming and using that basis to tell services like hosting and customization may or may not be the wave of the future. But it's a smart bet.

Only time will tell if it's the winning bet.

--Edward R. O'Neill

From Grading to Feedback & Coaching

2010-11-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

Nels Highberg wrote humorously today about the karma/irony of chiding other instructors for viewing grading in a negative light: then he had some to do himself.

Having just wrapped up some grading yesterday, this topic is on my mind.

I teach some online courses: notably, a series on film history, and an introductory screenwriting course.

These have weekly discussion and assignments needing scoring and feedback. So it's safe to say I'm grading EVERY week.

It will always be a chore. But today I'm still basking in the experience of sharing some of the course's more ambitious goals with the students--and trying to inspire those few who don't seem to be working as hard as they might.

Structured and approached in the right light, grading can be a positive interaction I look forward to--and something students enjoy and appreciate as well.

I've noticed that professors usually talk about "grading"--whereas administrators and instructional technologists & designers tend to talk about "assessment."

The term "assessment" gets at some things "grading" doesn't. "Grading" sounds like assigning a score, making a (final) judgment about the value, merit or quality.

It can be very helpful, however, to think of grading as "feedback." Educational theory uses the term "assessment" in two flavors, formative and summative, and "feedback" falls under the formative heading.

Professor Highberg is right, in my opinion, to point to rubrics used in administrative processes as a model for grading. And if the implication is "use a clear rubric," I agree.

I would only add two things.

Grading can be less painful (for both instructor and student) when the instructor: gives clear 'actionable' feedback on the most pressing problems; coaches the student towards the bigger course issues.

These have multiple benefits. First, if the problems are few and fix-able, that gives the student hope. The message supports efficacy--instead of overloading the student with *all* their flaws.

Second, focusing on bigger course issues--the nature of historical thinking, e.g., or the creative process (to mention the issues in my film history and screenwriting courses)--keeps the student inside the key course topics, rather than waiting outside in some anteroom where those who can't write a good transition are kept waiting until enlightenment strikes.

This doesn't get instructors out of grading--just out of feeling like it's "hell."

--Edward R. O'Neill, Ph.D.

iPhone to Your TV or Data Projector? Yes.

2009-04-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

Walt Mossberg (of the Wall Street Journal) apparently doesn't know about this (WJS 4/30/09 p. D2).

Or maybe it's his minions who didn't google right. (Sometimes other people publish under their own byline but with Walt's name up top. Is that like a movie being produced by one person but directed by another?)

In any case, it must be pretty hard to figure out if Walt can't figure it out, because he's a hepcat. (And if you know what hepcat means, you're too old to be reading this blog. I bet Walt knows. I love teasing Walt, because there are so few things to tease him about. Also, he's kinda cute.)

So let me give you the lowdown.

Buy yourself some Apple iPhone component AV cables. Or Apple composite AV cables. Which you use depends on the inputs on your TV or data project: composite are more backwards-compatible, component more up-to-date.

Yes, they're a tad dear, these cables: nearly fifty bucks. But they get the job done.

With these cables (and the included power supply) you can output some iPhone (and iPod) stuff to a TV, display or video projector.

Yes, only some.

Basically, you can show a video file or play a photo slideshow.

The original Steve Jobs sales pitch for iPhone in which he projected the whole interface--well, that suggests the capacity is in there somewhere but is normally disabled. Maybe a jailbroken iPhone could do it? With the right app? Or maybe Jobs didn't want the iPhone to cannibalize his own laptop business. In any event, this is one particular cat I wish they'd let out of its software-dis-enabled bag.

But the photos slideshow option means you can convert Powerpoint to jpeg's or tiff's, store them on your mobile device, and then give a presentation entirely from your phone. Forget bringing your laptop, just bring the phone and cables.

Yes, you'll need big font for this--so don't overcrowd your slides. And the normal Powerpoint jpegs are too small: in Windows I print to tiffs using Zan Image Printer (another $50--it adds up).

Or you can make a slideshow into a movie (using iPhoto or iMovie, for instance) and let that run in the background as you give your presentation.

(My Stanford handout, replete with details for students about how to check out equipment, is here and has some additional tips.)

I've done this in presentations at Stanford for over a year now--and trained students to do the same. (Yes, college undergraduates are ahead of Walt Mossberg in some ways--it's just a generational thing, we'll have to get used to it.)

And I gave a professional conference at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Philadelphia in 2008 using this setup. In-the-know techies swooned afterwards like it was a parlor magic trick: "How did you do that?" (Kind of like when in 2001 I gave a talk at the same conference that I then streamed to the web. I love me some toys.)

With this approach, you have simplicity, lightweightness and sexiness going for you. It's a conversation-starter--or a distraction, depending on the topic. So use these tools wisely--as always.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Forget Bookmarks.

2009-04-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

That's in the imperative.

I mean: don't collect bookmarks in your browser.

Doing so means a browser synch tool, and they're mostly browser-specific and unwieldy, I find.

Instead, make most of your bookmarks public.

I use delicious. You add a link to your browser that takes you from any web page to a delicious page that adds the prior page to your delicious bookmarks.

You tag the pages with whatever's relevant for you or others--"learningtechnology," "instructionaldesign," "xml," the like.

Now you can find all your tagged pages anywhere you have a web connection.

AND anyone else can browse your tags or see those tags when tagging a page themselves.

Saving and sharing become the same thing.

Want students to collect and share bookmarks? Create a class account--it's free, and have everyone tag pages.

Want to send someone your links about javascript? http://delicious.com/edwardoneill/javascript

Tagged with javascript and API? http://delicious.com/edwardoneill/javascript+API

Etc.

No more browser plug-ins or bookmark synching. No more sorting bookmarks into a tree structure. Just click, tag, be done.

Your bookmarks: anywhere.

(Yes, you can make private ones, too.)

--Edward R. O'Neill

Positive and Negative Educations.

2009-04-10T23:11:00.000-07:00

How often in higher education we fail our brightest students.

I had dinner tonight with a friend. He dropped out of a rather prestigious private university--after several years. (He gave it a good go.)

He loves technology. He programs now. He has his own startup. And he wants to write educational applications that are also social media--or vice-versa.

He knows the universe of social media. He's insightful.

The fact that he wants to help higher education is rather surprising--given that he left formal education some time ago.

I asked him what his best educational experiences in college were.

I had learned, for instance, in my senior thesis how to explore my own ideas and to write them with pleasure and some degree of art.
I had learned in my junior theater project how to make decisions to communicate with an audience--and how the failure to make decisions damns your work to muteness.

The exact stories are probably more interesting than the conclusions. But I learned what was interesting and meaningful to me, how to develop my own thoughts and work, what my criteria for success and failure were.

He was hard pressed.

He said that he took classes thinking he would be interested and ultimately learned that he was not.
Or he learned that a professor's statements undermined their own authority: he was disabused with authority, and that was what he learned.

These are important lessons.

You could call them negative education: learning what you don't like or want, what is not the case, what is not to be believed.

Positive education, by contrast, is represented by growth towards personal goals of self-fulfillment through engagement with others and with a pre-existing body of thought.

Whether with technology or without it, positive education is difficult to foster.

And when we fail to attend to students' needs, they get an education alright, but not the one for which we might have hoped.

--E. R. O'Neill

Learning Really Does Happen.

2009-02-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's refreshing to remind oneself.

I even manage to learn myself sometimes.

Perhaps it's not true of everyone who works in fields where learning is the core activity, but it's true of me: I love learning new things.

As much as I'm a creature of habit--I drink the same coffee every day, eat the same salad, will drink the same wine night after night, just different vineyards to appreciate the differences--I also like to feel I'm growing.

So when I decided to do a thorough re-design of my distance learning courses (screenwriting, film history, the horror genre), Ireally did some research.

The attrition rate had been high. And I thought the learning was slow. Students tended to type something and run--like an email, an IM or a tweet. I didn't see careful reflection, real grasping of underlying issues and ides.

How could I keep students involved, doing the work?
How could I allow them to deepen their learning?

So I did some reading. My two major resources were:

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (2004) and

National Research Council, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (Expanded Edition, 2000).

In the film history class, for instance:

I started by inviting students to discussion an exciting, juicy question, and to bring in their current-day, real-world experiences.

E.g., "Do you have a favorite Youtube video? What makes it enjoyable to watch? Why watch an internet video rather than TV or a movie? What kind of pleasure do you get from each? How are you similar to or different from your peers in this respect?"

Students earned points just for discussing, apart from any evaluation of quality--so as not to instill fear which might inhibit them.

The discussion experience has some inherent pleasure, because students are familiar with gossiping online about semi-hot-button topics.

People can start by sharing opinions that are ready-formed, then begin to question their standing ideas, as the discussion assignment asks them to compare and contrast themselves to their peers.

There's little possibility of failure. There's no prerequisite knowledge--no first step of doing any reading. There's the opportunity to excel. And there's a social motivation.

Simultaneously, study questions and a quiz guided students to relevant facts in the reading and to online screenings, clips, or videos students watch at the library or at home.

Factual knowledge is tested not just as sheer facts but as implications. It's not just "when did Edison invent such-and-such?" but "how was Edison's approach to film exhibition wrong?": knowing the answer involves connecting the facts in a larger story and complex of related implications.

Students then come back later in the week and connect their discussion of current topics to reading about the past. ("How was watching cinema using Edison's or Lumiere's technologies different or similar from watching a Youtube video?")

The results were generally good. This quarter is still unfolding, but I'm generally pleased so far--though there is still room to improve the course design.

Recently, when re-shelving my books, I looked at How People Learn again.

I went to the dog-eared pages to see what I had learned.

Substantial curiosity-arousing questions can motivate learners more than points or grades (46).

Pre-existing knowledge crucially structures what kind of new information and concepts learners will adopt--and what they won't (10-15).

Experts have a body of facts and experiences at their fingertips, but this body is not an end in itself, it's an initial step that allows the experts to recognize patterns or gestalts (32-36).

Some learners are motivated by a desire to avoid failure, some by a desire to excel, some by a desire to connect socially with others (60-61).

In short, I actually took what I learned and applied it.

By structuring student discussion, study questions, quizzes and assignments along certain lines, I was encouraging the kind of learning I wanted based on what research had shown.

In Bloom's famous taxonymy, learning must

start with listing, organizing, arranging and recalling facts,
move on to expressing these facts in their own understanding, grasping inner relationships, abstracting laws and concepts,
move then to applying concepts, seeing how similar ideas work in different concepts,
ascend to quetioning assumptions, comparing and contrasting ideas, reasoning from assumptions to conclusions, tinkering with arguments,
graduate to sythesizing original, personal ideas that could be tested, and
terminate in drawing conclusions and evaluating ideas and arguments based on specific criteria.

So in theory, perhaps one should master all factual matters, then move forward to understanding the relationships among these facts.

But if learners acquire facts within a framework which is inappropriate, which doesn't match the historical circumstances, for instance, then the damage is already done.

Indeed, it was one of my first learning experiences about teaching that learners can't easily reach back into the past and re-order their perceptions within new frameworks: they need to get the framework, then practice using it to sort facts and experiences, then practice more.

Perhaps one wants learners to end by drawing conclusions.

But adult learners habitually draw conclusions--and they arrive with conclusions pre-formed. You can't reasonably ask an adult to become a tabula rasa, to resist drawing any and all conclusions until they have mastered a new discipline--ten weeks later.

So instead, I decided to elicit prior knowledge and conclusions, then ask students to debate those.

Once they were prepared to have their assumptions challenged, they had 'loosened up' their cognitive frameworks.

They could sort new information into the existing framework, while also seeing that framework challenged.

And then they could re-order the new information and their existing beliefs at the same time.

This was a much more pleasurable experience for them--and for me.

And more pleasure for them meant higher student retention, more intrinsic involvement in the material, and thus better learning outcomes.

But I may still yet learn more and better in the future.

--Edward R. O'Neill

O Brave New World!

2009-02-20T13:34:00.001-08:00

It's not been so long since Steven Soderbergh released Bubble in theaters and DVD nearly simultaneously.

Now a fascinating new documentary entitled Must Read After My Death (just written up glowingly in the Wall Street Journal) is showing in New York, LA and also online.

For us non-New Yorker, non-Angelino cinephiles, this is good news.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Don't Move Your Lips!

2009-02-11T14:55:00.001-08:00

As Amazon introduces a new version of the Kindle Reader that will read the text aloud to you, the Authors' Guild claims that reading aloud is a reserved right!

So all of you who've been reading books aloud for all these years--you're all due for some whopper fines.

--E. R. O'Neill

Simple Tools, Multiple Uses.

2009-02-06T12:42:00.000-08:00

An open letter to Walter Mossberg.

Mossberg!

I saw your recent column on Foxmarks.

Saving your solitary bookmarks, keeping them private, sorting them in a tree-and-folder structure, worrying about moving them around--that is so adorable, so web 1.0. As if they're mp3's you bought that you can't legally share.

Dude--get social! It's the Age of Obama.
SHARE your bookmarks.
TAG them, don't put them in folders.
LEARN from the wisdom of crowds what's up-and-coming.

Use Delicious!

Tag sites with your OWN tags--whatever you like. Forget folders--where a page is in one folder OR another. Tags let you imagine each website page as an intersection or multiple properties. They're your own tags--so you can use your own folksonomy. (Google it).

Add comments. Give your HO (humble opinion). Ballyhoo a site, or just set yourself a reminder.

Your links are shared with everyone--and you can search to see what other people are finding, tagging and sharing.

Or make your tags private. It's your choice.

The web is a social medium. You should use it that way.

Best,
Edward O'Neill, Ph.D.
Instructional Media Specialist
Stanford University

P.S. I'm normally skeptical of the pro-social media rhetoric. But the point I think is always right is: a general use tool that's simple is almost always better than a tool dedicated to ONE function.

Saving and syncing bookmarks--that's one function. Tagging, sharing, publishing--that's a general use.

Look at Twitter. It publishes SMS-size tidbits. But people can use it as email, microblogging, marketing, brand management, citizen journalism, trend monitoring--you name it.

In Web 2.0 the specialized tool is almost never as powerful as the simple tool with a hundred uses.

Your Calendar Can Remind You.

2009-01-24T12:10:00.000-08:00

So you have calendaring software.

And IF your computer is on, and IF the software is running, and IF you are there at your desk and looking at your computer, THEN you can get reminders in advance.

That's a lot of IF's.

Enter Google calendars.

They have a ton of neat features: for instance, you can set up multiple calendars and publish any of them for all the world to see. (Think: course paper deadlines, softball team schedules, the like.)

Now the calendars will also remind you any number of times in any amount of time in advance--via email or SMS.

That's right. You set click on the event to enter its details. Then under "Options," you add a reminder. You can add more than one--I've not found the upper limit--and then you "Save."

Voila! I get text messages on my phone warning me of upcoming meetings, to call people, to send things in the mail, homework, whatever.

Thank you, Google!

--E. R. O'Neill

Small Is Beautiful.

2009-01-19T11:48:00.000-08:00

A computer in your wireless keyboard that streams HD to your TV? Possibly.

--E. R. O'Neill

Visualizing Hope.

2009-01-15T14:55:00.001-08:00

Hopes for the new administration--visualized as an interactive word cloud.

--E. R. O'Neill

Powerpoint on the Web without Paying Microsoft?

2009-01-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

Yes.

If you're comfortable hand-coding html or using a tool that can be massaged to take the stylesheet of your choice, there's a completely XHTML/CSS solution.

You make some rudimentary pages. When they're linked to a document definition, styleshseet and javascript, you get ordered slides--even with click-and-unfold outlines.

The reflexive demonstrations is here: http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy

A nice primer is here: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/primer.html

--E. R. O'Neill

Turn your Google search into an RSS feed.

2009-01-12T15:02:00.000-08:00

http://feedmysearch.com/

Turns any Google search into an rss feed--atom or whatever flavor you like.

Add the feed to your feed reader--Google, or any other.

--E. R. O'Neill

Old LP's to New Mp3's.

2009-01-11T15:44:00.001-08:00

This actually rather nice--so far.

It's made by TEAC, so you expect a certain level of competence.

It records LP's to mp3's at 96, 128 or 156kbps--no other choices--and puts them on a USB drive or SD memory card.

From thence you can move them to your computer, and edit at will.

No, it's not recording to a 'raw' format like a .wav file. But it's useful.

I did have a portable turntable I could jack into my Windows box and record to .wav or .mp3.

But there was no auto-return function on the tone arm, so you had to be there when the record ended--not out of the room for five seconds. That added to the inconvenience.

This promises to be simpler.

I was put off at first because the one warm won't move if the box isn't powered on and in PHONO mode!

But now my 1952 Metropolitan Opera recording of Salome and Elektra on LP with Welitsch and Varney, respectively, is sounding good.

You won't find a better price than here: http://www.jr.com/teac/pe/TEA_LPU200/

--E. R. O'Neill

You have no idea...

2009-01-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

...how hard it is to find a title for this blog that isn't taken yet.

And most of the titles are taken--but the blogs are empty.

Cybersquatting!

Then again, does Blogger even have a way to reqlinquish a site name?

--E. R. O'Neill