I surfed upon this blog recently, and bookmarked it in “sage,” if for no other reason than because I just love the introduction to the blog: “In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990’s moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care.”

The most recent post is an administration haiku. I’m not sure the poetic flow of the Japanese haiku retains its ease in this English iteration, perhaps due to the disturbing nature of its insinuation. It’s hard to pick a favorite verse, but I’ll go with this one:

Perkins funding gone
Always more for Iraq war
Be all you can be

Read the entire masterpiece of Administration Haiku…

In the past, I have resisted bringing a laptop around at conferences and trying to take notes/reflect on presentations simultaneously. There is a certain burden in doing so. Foremost, I worry that I am being more critical than I would be if i were just listening and taking notes by hand. Because I can type much faster, I concentrate on almost every word. I felt more free criticizing the sales presentation than I ever would a faculty or staff member presenting their strategies or experience. I’m positive that in a face-to-face interaction with any of the presenters, I would phrase my comments differently. I don’t know that anyone will find my comments helpful or insightful, though I personally find it useful for categorizing what I am taking away from the conference. However, of course, the take aways are tangential to the concurrent sessions. In a session that I did not blog, I discussed with a faculty member ideas for collaboration on an online course design and how that might translate into a grant application. I’ve been able to put names with faces in terms of people I work with or who I might want to work with in the future. And as I take a break to put together some final changes to my presentations for tomorrow, I hope that I don’t lose my voice, which seems to be slowly happening…

This presentation, by a history professor at VWCC, outlined his strategies for organizing his course online in order to support learners.

He described his objective as trying to identify those that want to be there, and try to engage them so they will persist and succeed in the class. He shared his online orientation: http://www.vw.vccs.edu/vwhansd/HIS_Main/Menu.html.

Some of the things he modeled were grading policy for the discussion board, rubric, graph connecting discussion board participation with grade (it’s possible to do well without contributing to the discussion board, as he also described one student who got a B without participating), suggestions for threaded discussion. All of these are really essential components in an online course (or rather rubrics and examples are essential for any course where projects, threaded discussion, journaling are taking place).

The real take-away from this presentation was his wording on his site, that the course would require: “Continuous attention, thoughtful communication, and reflective thinking. The discussion board is our vehicle for progressing through the course as a class, not merely as individual sharing a common experience.” This would be the ideal for the online learning experience, and I hope that more faculty see it in this manner.

However, the comments correlating spelling and grammatical style (or lack thereof) to intelligence (ie, example of student who wrote in a “valley girl style” being a moron and his graduate student daughter spelling like a “not very smart eighth grader”) became tedious, as this came up several times over the course of the presentation. I get it, it’s a pet peeve, but each of us has different strengths, and in fact, these comments bespeak a prejudice that can alienate students who might have a learning disability that prevents their success in these areas–but who will have great ideas that add to the course communication. And to be clear, I’m not advocating accepting without critique assignments with errors and poor grammar. I’m just suggesting that labeling students lacking in certain skill areas as “stupid” is a potential recipe for discouraging students who may be talented in other ways.

Let’s start with, the presenter/sales rep (let’s call a spade a spade) began with an anecdote about MIT professors, that some have expressed that “someone will have to pry the chalk from their cold dead hand, they’re using no technology at all.” Right, just written and spoken language (two underrated technologies these days) and chalk (with its miraculous ephemeral nature). Combine this comment, with the fact that this presentation was at 8:30 am, it was hard to maintain an open mind about the value of a presentation that doesn’t acknowledge the technological innovation of chalk. I am generally not in the mood for technological evangelists first thing after breakfast.

The presentation was clearly geared from a business perspective, and if I were in charge of purchasing, I would not be sold. I wish that this presentation started out with a demonstration, to give a better understanding of what this software can do. Use Gagne’s principle of gain attention for goodness sake. Much of the rationale for why this tool will be helpful is aggravating, because personally, I don’t need to know WHY students need access to their course materials asynchronously, because I already believe that there should be materials available. And as a designer, I have no idea why I would use this tool instead of my existing available tools. Yes, if the ease of use is as advertised, it could make this accessible to faculty, however, the biggest barrier I have in working with faculty and getting them to add lectures to their course—even audio, when they have all the equipment—they don’t make time to do it.

Let’s start with the rationale presented for why I would use this product:
1) Student retention: The information is hard, they don’t understand it, and then they leave. So this is to provide them with the tools that they need, in order to deter dropouts by “being able to give them the access that they need online.” I am interested in retaining students, and this might be another way to provide material in a different way. However, what is so different about this from any number of the materials: articulate, captivate, camtasia, centra, plain old audio, plain old video, captioned video, recording smartboard/tablet, and the list goes on…

2) Financial: Colleges can recognize more dollars in the long run (as our dropping student won’t ask for fee reimbursement). I understand that colleges are businesses, however, justifying integration of technology purely from an economic standpoint is annoying if you are on the instructional side. (And again, if I were an administrator, I would want to know why this, more than other video and flash presentations is retaining students.) Further, the presenter describes, we would adopt this technology because it will differentiate our (educational) product. Not our student’s learning (though to be fair, learning outcomes are mentioned periodically). Pedagogically, I am not hearing what makes this product more engaging than other similar products. This whole presentation is designed at a business/marketing audience.

Finally, after 40 minutes we get a demonstration. This interface has video in the corner, smartboard in the main portion of the screen. Underneath the video, there is a thumbnail sequence so students can choose between “modules.” As I watch the video with the writing, I found the simultaneous video and text distracting, but as the student, you can block out the video, which distracts attention from what is being demoed in the main screen. However, one of the Technology in Education awards at this conference demonstrated how one would record almost the same thing, a math lecture, using the smartboard and camtasia. I don’t know the cost of this product to compare the price.

“The best tools are the ones where faculty have to do nothing and voila, the presentation is online.” Now I really feel like I’m trying to be sold something. I have yet to find a new technology that doesn’t require some learning curve, and to say it won’t sets people up for failure. Further, just providing a technology by itself is never an ideal solution—faculty should be given a space to contemplate their instructional methods and strategies, and frankly, should be designing class time to be more than just lectures. Of course, I don’t believe that throwing the baby out with the bathwather is necessary—this could be a fantastic tool to require students to view the lecture part before the collaboratively designed class time.

So yes, I am sold on making lecture materials available to students online, though I’m not sure what this particular product does that we are not already trying to do. However, at the end, the faculty member I was attending with was very excited about the product and wants to look into it…so apparently I’m being a little hard on this presentation by focusing on the message instead the magical technology. And I am hard-pressed to identify another tool that integrates all three of the components (video, smartboard/powerpoint, and breadcrumb trail of modules) in this one interface.

Blogging from New Horizons Conference, sponsored by the Virginia Community College System.
For the first session at New Horizons, I chose An Introduction to Authentic Learning. I thought it would provide insight into what the VCCS is doing in this area.

The presenter (Karen Griffith) began by sharing an anecdote about adding team-building and community service to an IT curriculum and saw the results on a standardized test at the end of the course move from 25% completion to 100% completion, even though there was not specific focus on teaching to the test: “the learning happens on its own” but you have to “release a little bit of control on when it’s learned and how it’s learned.”

We talked about what project based learning is, which the audience generated (in no particular order): authentic activity, reflection, students choose topic, relevance of project to real world applications (beyond just theoretical), setting goals, implementing and modifying strategies.

Then we covered barriers to implementing project-based learning: it’s messy, time consuming, students resist getting involved because they want to know exactly what to do. The presenter mentioned here that 6 of her 16 students dropped her class the first time she implemented project learning in her class, which coincides with research that indicates that students will self-select out of project based courses. Later, she added more to this topic, including the instructor must be a facilitator and can’t control all parts of the process, which can be hard to adapt to.

One of many excellent quotes: “Taking yourself out of the subject matter expert role…when that happens, when we give students choices, they make choices that we wouldn’t have made.” And she makes an excellent point that in the classroom is a great place for students to try things out, to develop critical thinking, and maybe fail—at least it’s a better place than a first job.”

The importance of authentic learning is, as the presentation indicated, closely linked to relevance in the real world. “Situating the student” in a role in a team, can highlight where students strengths are.

Of course, this presentation naturally links project-based learning to industry expectations, as a rationale for authentic learning experiences. This presumes that what we are doing as educators is largely as apprenticing students into business or technical business environments. That is, indeed, a logical argument for implementing problem-based learning; however, a larger argument would be that students can develop broader critical thinking skills.

We talked about internships versus project based learning in the classroom, and the presenter suggested creating business partnerships where business partners are called in to give problems, recreated in a multimedia environment. (Actually, here, differentiation between project-based learning, problem-based learning, and case-based learning became very muddled). The sugestion/demonstration in the session was is to collect video, audio, images of business partner describing problem, which the students are then presented with, and this approach moves away from a pencil and paper based case study.

This presentation has great supplemental materials, including a rubric for evaluating the quality of a “problematic situation” (not a problem, as the problem will not be “defined” but the students will be called upon to define the problem).

In all of this, the audience was obviously faculty who are interested and/or already implementing authentic learning, problem-based learning, etc. However, when I think about the faculty I work with, I can’t think of any that are doing this. And as I look at the case study that the instructor developed, it is great. I was a little wary with a somewhat cheesy intro (sorry!!!–just someone went a little crazy with weird transitions).) However, point and shoot video capturing different perspectives, without script, just each of the stakeholders describing the problem from their perspective. (Actually, it reminded me of doing a needs assessment as a graduate student in Instructional Design.) The presenter said the video took 2 hours…I’m guessing it took a little longer than that with editing, but the point is with clear objectives of what to record, it would be a scalable model for creating new case studies with fresh content fairly easily. I loved the ideas presented here—it was a great session to start the conference with.