October 2008 Archives

This is a presentation from the University of Southern Florida Polytechnic.  This idea was pitched by Naomi Boyer to their equivalent of the faculty senate.  The faculty senate then brought it to the administration. (Interesting path)

They invite faculty to participate in a one-year faculty development cohort.  To start, they are asked to fill out an application and commit to training, discussion of teaching practice, assessing the impact, and sharing what they are learning.  During the summer, they are trained in a wide range of established technologies and techniques (course management systems, videoconferencing, web quests, action research, etc...).  The following semester, they go into depth in a few tools or techniques.  The implementation plans are discussed with an instructional designer and the faculty include assessment into their plans.

Some of the first cohort of faculty wanted to continue into a second year and act as mentors to the faculty who are coming into the program.

Four stages of each cohort's development:

1. Application: Needs assessment and collaboration
2. Delivery: Provide an array of training sessions - including training directly from vendors, form learning community of faculty
3. Follow-up: Monthly meetings, peer mentoring, just in time support
4. Evaluation: Implementation reflections, research presentations

Faculty who went through this program decided to get together and start developing online courses.  Again, this was brought to the faculty senate and then sold to the administration.  Naomi formed faculty teams who developed the course materials together (faculty are paid for course development).  The finished materials go through a peer review process (based on the Quality Matters criteria). 

Overall, Naomi found that by reducing the anxiety that faculty feel about using technology, they were more willing to take risks and propose something of their own.  Also, the conversation changed over time from "using technology" to teaching and the tools that support what they want to do.

We're into the discussion section now.  I showed the faculty success stories from the TLT Symposium.  Naomi asked for the URL and several other people seemed interested in the idea of a faculty showcase and having faculty bring ideas to us instead of the other way around.

Quick note before my battery dies.  I went to the Educause Learning Initiative meeting over lunch.  They basically covered the range of services and events that ELI offers: the ELI meeting, special focus sessions, the "7 things you need to know about..." papers, etc...  I got the feeling that this is the group that best fits my interests and that it might be time in my career to get involved with a group like ELI for three reasons: first, so I have a more complete idea of what they offer and I can bring those resources back to Penn State; second, so I can share the work that Penn State is doing around instructional technologies; third, so I can have a hand in shaping the future of ELI. 

By that, I mean that currently there are a lot of resources that ELI produces under the Educause brand, but there are also a lot of other resources available that address issues in the instructional technology space (for example, ETS Talk).  I'd like ELI to open up in a sense, making it easier for participants to contribute their own work and still give credit to their home institutions. I also think that the "7 things" series could be expanded by a companion podcast series that would include interviews with experts on each of the technologies discussed.  I talked to Julie Little (interim director of ELI) about this idea after the session and she liked it a lot, especially now that Educause is going to take the 7-things paper idea and expand it to other Educause interest areas.  Another interest of mine is in unconferences.  Julie and I talked about how they are taking unconference ideas and implementing them at the ELI meeting.  I told her about some of the things we did for the Learning Design Summer Camp and she seemed interested in that as well.

I'm at a session about new learning spaces - mostly looking at classroom design, not like the collaborative learning spaces that we have in Pollock.  The session is being taught in the lobby, using much of the new types of furniture and layout that the presenter is talking about.  Some of the main points that I found interesting (paraphrased and mixed in with some things I've been thinking about for a while):

• The structure of a learning space sets the tone for what is done there.  Very true - it applies to work spaces as well and we got similar feedback when we moved the Symposium to the Penn Stater.  Having this session in an open and flexible space was a very good choice.
  
• You can design a space, but you need to have the people who are going to be building it on board so they understand what kind of activity will happen there -- so they don't bolt-down chairs, or run network and power only to the front of the room.  Even lighting design needs to be considered.
• He's saying that we need to enable a two-way exchange of information between faculty and students.  I think as we move to collaborative spaces, we should think about a partnership to co-investigate and co-create (faculty-student and student-student).
• The impact of these spaces may be more on retention than on learning outcomes, especially for part-time and adult students.

Important elements:

• Flexible furniture
• Multiple display screens (different information on each)
  
• Seamless interconnections between everyone in the class (student to student)
• Floor network and power (so tables don't have to be fixed)
  

Reasons to build and things to consider:

• Support problem-based learning and student collaboration
• Multiple channels of information for non-linear teaching and learning
• Focus on higher-order learning - processes, synthesis, evaluation
• Faculty have to give up some control for this to work

Initially, they spent a lot of time on design and technology without much thought to pedagogy.  After opening the doors, there were a lot of problems that they had not considered, so they had to make some changes. 

These days, they focus primarily on pedagogy.  Their support program includes an instructional designer who can help them adjust their courses as needed instead of trying to do complete course redesigns.  They also use a Ning network to share ideas, which faculty are actually using it to talk to each other. Immediacy of faculty support, which is right next to the learning spaces, is much more effective than pre-scheduled workshops that aren't tied to a timely application.

They have a proposal process to be able to teach using these spaces, so it can be tied into training and course consultations.  The learning spaces are also scheduled independent of academic discipline.  Faculty bring content knowledge and are assisted with pedagogy and technology issues - they may need help knowing how and why they should use these spaces in light of what they need to teach.

Levels for faculty engagement:

• Improvements in Efficiency and/or effectiveness
• Extending existing pedagogy
• Change pedagogy
• Transform the course

Student learning activities in these spaces still include lectures, but much more of a focus on group projects, giving presentations, and collaboratively creating content with others.  Students report that these spaces have helped them think more creatively and solve complex problems.

Lessons learned:

• Select technologies based on pedagogical application, not vice-versa
• Make it simple to increase adoption.  The technologies should be transparent.
  
• Empower students
• Software-based videoconferencing systems may be better to use than hardware-based systems since guests who faculty want to bring in are unlikely to have access to the hardware
  
• Build a sandbox first, then build a castle
• Don't cram the room full of furniture if you expect people to move it!
• Technology is not going to save you money
• Roadblocks to setting up these spaces may have nothing to do with design: more related to management
• The interactive elements of the classroom are an incentive to encourage students to come to class

Project and Presentation: http://ic.sjsu.edu/news
Pictures: incubator classrooms on Flickr

This session is a report of the major trends that have come out of the cross-university Campus Computing Project.  Top issues this year were:

• Hiring and Retaining IT Staff: IT employment is back to its dot-com high
• Network and Data Security: some of this is related to departments doing their own thing, social computing concerns, spyware, employee misconduct, and other sources of concern.
• Budget cuts
  

New types of strategic plans are showing up at universities:

• Emergency notification (anything from phone messaging to campus sirens).  Most emergency notification systems are opt-in and may have 30% participation.
  
• Web 2.0
• Wireless connectivity (iPhones, laptops, and other mobile devices)
  

Copyright issues: Some campuses spending $500K+ for compliance with P2P monitoring and enforcement projects. Higher Education Act: requires us to have a written plan to combat peer to peer sharing, we have to have technological systems in place to act as a deterrent, required to provide an alternative service (like Ruckus).

Most colleges and universities have anti-plagiarism software systems in place (Turnitin in our case).  Mostly used for lower-division courses.

Open source LMS (Moodle and Sakai) deployment is growing (10% to 25% depending on the type of institution).  Moodle is taking off in private 4-year colleges.

Kenneth Green: Questions in the third decade of campus computing:

• Why don't faculty do more with technology
• Why don't colleges make better use of IT
• Why don't colleges assess the impact of their IT investments

Other thoughts:

• Despite great technology, our reach continues to exceed out grasp
• The consumer and corporate experience defines expectations about campus IT resources and services.
• Rising pressure to prove increases in productivity and learning gains through the use of technology

Growing interest in proving outcomes based on the Spellings report:

• Edward Demming: "In God we trust, all others bring data"
• Satisfaction reports aren't enough
• Need to tie to program objectives

That's the quick summary.  This guy has a lot of data and it seems like he's selling it the form of a book "Campus Computing 2008" for $37 per copy.  I think it would be worth us buying a copy and seeing how it compares to our FACAC survey and the Pew Internet and American Life data.

After the extended instructional technology discussion, I talked briefly with Bryan Alexander (of NITLE and TLT Symposium fame) and then headed off to a session about deploying iPhones on campus.  Not much of it was actually new information to me -- they talked a lot about the iPhone features, 3G version, application store, VPN client, optimizing web sites for iPhone use, etc... 

The one thing that I thought was useful was that they showed the iStandord application, which is a nice way for students on campus to get information about where they are and local university-oriented information (classes tied to a campus map, athletics, etc...)

Over lunch, I grabbed my lunch and headed to a room where people who were interested in instructional technologies were meeting.  Cyprien Lomas (mentioned before) ran the session and asked us to talk though the ways that we can be helping each other.  I won't go into the complete list here, but a few ideas stood out.

It turns out that a lot of people in the room were not aware of what the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) is already doing, so signing up for the INSTTECH list was a first step.  My group also talked about their webinars, special topic meetings, and the ELI conference in January.

One of the first issues that came up in my group was finding the time to look into and evaluate new tools.  I talked about ELI's "Seven things you should know about..." series, which I think is a good start, but there needs to be another level of translation before it gets into the hands of faculty.  "Seven things you should know about ... at Penn State" makes more sense, so it includes real local examples and where the faculty can go to get started and to get support.  I talked about our whitepapers and the hot team process.

Educuase has person-profiles where people can give their background and interests, but it would be interesting to have an institutional profile page so people know which institutions have experience with the implementation of new tools and services.  Cyprien really liked that idea and I think it will be coming soon.

Another group said that we need a kind of "epinions" site, where people could honestly review products and vendors.  We get a lot of marketing speak through Educause, but a few success stories and war stories would be more useful.  Related to this, we often share what works, but not what doesn't work -- that means that the "doesn't work" route may be explored over and over, which is not a good use of resources.

Other ideas: scaling staff to meet the support challenge, assessment and evaluation, change management, and opportunities for collaboration.  The general theme is that we are all generating knowledge and by sharing that knowledge, we can potentially save resources instead of going down a dead end. 

The complete list of ideas is on the session wiki.  Overall, it was an interesting session, but our group spent more time talking about specific tools and services than talking about collaboration opportunities.  Still, based on this discussion, I would be more likely to look into echo360 (automated class capturing system) and it sounds like ELI is open to showcasing some of our faculty success stories on their site.

Gardner Campell: The discussion is starting with academic publishing and the wikipedia entry for it and its history. We are constantly in the process of academic publishing, but it all disappears: graded paper, graded exams, and then it all goes away. It's all invisible and then lost.

Exploration of the web and how it can transform education lead away from course management systems and toward blogs. Blogs are simple, built for the web, native to the web, easy to create templates, rapid development of proofs of concept. The experiment of using blogs to publish was transformative of teaching, learning, and relationships between everyone in the Campbell's course.

James Groom: Blogs - a syndication-oriented architecture: anything in the platoform can be shared and republished easily (okay, nothing new there, but I like the terms he is using). To include a post from the student's blog into the class, just use a tag that is specific to the course. That pulls it into a course-oriented portal and links back to their original work. They are using WordPress multi-user and the site-wide tag plugin, which creates a feed from any site-wide tag across the whole platform (similar to what we're doing). The course portal also lets students blog in other environments as long as they share their RSS feed.

[I think the social ratings element that Cole and Scott tried in Spring 2008 would add a lot to this discussion.]

Students using the system for ePortfolios as a continuous development system - claiming the work they are doing as their own intellectual property instead of just something they are doing for a class. Their system is friendly to having students buy their own domain and remap it to the UMW system -- again, this is related to feelings of ownership and being able to control your own materials instead of being locked into UMW's system.

Example: Eighteenth-Century Audio - students make audio recordings of poetry from the eighteenth century. This is a top Google hit and has contributed this content to the public. It has engaged students with the public at large.

Back to Campbell: One major element of the transformation was that the synthesis that he asked them to write at the end of the semester was not just a synthesis of their own work -- students synthesized the whole class discussion and used links to other blog posts as references.  This is the first time that happened.   This can be a little nerve-wracking because faculty who are blogging may be followed from semester to semester, even after the original course is over.  The learning community can transcend the boundaries of a course when it is embraced by both faculty and students.

Privacy and Controversial Content: Students need to embrace their public writing and understand that the content will be indexed and live forever.  FERPA concerns: Students can adopt user names if they don't want to be public.  The faculty should honor the concerns that students express [Seems like this should be something that is concerned in the syllabus of English and Comm courses and all others that have blogging assignments, similar to ADA disclaimers.] Students can also password protect posts (although this can impact automated aggregation systems).

Good point: people are not typically going to leave college and keep using BlackBoard or ANGEL, but they could learn to become public researchers and writers.

Our standard can't be "no risk at all" since that would lead to a barren system.  The trump card to this are those examples of student-public engagement.  For example, a student posted that he/she was having problems directing a play and got a comment on that post by the playwright, who said that he had problems writing that scene as well.

Campbell says that he still uses BlackBoard for grading, but not much else.  Faculty need to select the tools that are the best for the way they want to teach and not feel guilty about it.  Portability, flexibility, and power are more important to faculty than using a monolithic system.  Avoid clunky work-arounds and both the faculty and students can use the tool transparency and as it was built to be used (i.e. write in a blog since it was meant for writing).  This doesn't replace grading or quizzing functions.  Also, scaling assessment can be a problem.

Overall, this was a good session.  We're working in this space as well, but it was interesting to hear additional perspectives.  Campbell could be a good person to interview or bring in for a discussion.

I hope to be posting a series of quick notes based on the Educause sessions that I'm attending.  This is the first.

I'm at a session discussing the top teaching and learning challenges.  They did an overview of three challenges:

• We're in a tool-rich, but use-poor situation.  We have blogs, wikis, games,
• Literacies: Written, Oral, and Visual media that includes the specialized vocabulary and techniques of each
• The challenge of introducing new technology to faculty.  Students are willing and ready to adopt, but faculty lag significantly behind since they are not technology experts and don't get rewarded for their use of technology.

They asked everyone to gather around flip charts around the room to discuss their top challenges and select the one to report out on with the rest of the group.  They are also using an online survey and project site: http://www.educause.edu/eli/Challenges/127397

Okay...getting up to participate around a flip chart...



... back now with a new "I challenge you!" sticker on my jacket.  I also got to talk briefly with Cyprien Lomas (really smart guy from University of British Columbia if you don't know who he is).  People are lined up behind a mic and reporting out now. 



Top challenges (I don't agree with all of these -- just reporting out):

• Faculty don't know what they don't know (use of CMS tools as places to dump PowerPoint).  Lack of understanding of learning theory in teaching application.  We teach the way we were taught.
• Micala speaks: We need ways to reward faculty for using technology
• Assessment: how do you assess new media to measure impact.  Use of technology alone isn't enough
• Faculty Development: rewarding innovation and risk taking, assessment, stretching resources to make the tools available
• Larry Ragan: Identifying and measuring core competencies for instructors.  How Web 2.0 technologies tie together and relate to each other in a coherent way.
• Producing effective solutions that actually impact teaching and learning.
• Teaching transferrable skillsets: teach faculty and students fundamentals that are not tied to a particular technology.  The technologies will change.
  

The plan is to collect ideas through their wiki and Ning network.  They are asking people to sign up to take a role in the project: community builder, discussion facilitator, etc... And then people will vote for the top five issues in December. 

Overall, interesting and engaging session format.  I think some of the report-out ideas are one-sided.  In particular, I don't know that you can brainstorm and get into deep thinking about what faculty development and reward actually means.  It's not just workshops and money. Long-term engagement, faculty partnerships, research, and publications have to be factored into the equation.  There also seems to be a blind spot, as if the problem exists outside the group and that we (IT staff, administrators, etc...) don't also have the same challenges with appropriate adoption of new technologies and processes.  Do most IT staff understand learning theory?  Most don't have a background in education or much (if any) teaching experience, yet they build tools and set policies that affect teaching and learning. 

Anyway, lots of food for thought.

Quick note since I'm off to Educause tonight.  Will Diehl is another student in the Adult Education program who looks at online technologies that are used for distance education.  He stopped by class today to talk to us about distance education and open universities (like the Open University of the UK). 

A couple of the students in the class had a fairly typical reaction when you talk about the realities of mass distance education programs.  How can the courses be as good in comparision to personalized instruction?  We think that Penn State has a lot of students, but the China Central TV and Radio University has 2.3 million students who are supported by 85,000 part time and full time staff, so we could be talking about a television-based course with 10,000 people in it.  The fact is that higher education as-is isn't very personalized either.  When I was an undergraduate, the typical class size during my first two years was 100 to 200 students.  In those courses, the professor didn't personalize anything to me and didn't know my name.  One course was an exception: English 15 with about 25 students. 

Will and I told the other students in class that the typical open university uses a tiered system.  Students work with tutors, tutors report to faculty, and the faculty work with a lead faculty member, who is in charge of the course content and revisions.  Again, there was a typical reaction: "if I'm taking a course, I want to take it from the faculty member, not a susbstitute".  The exception that I mentioned above (English 15) is also a tiered system.  The course is developed centrally and then coordinated with a group of instructors and graduate students who teach students.

If we're thinking big (2.3 million students!), we need to think about some very different organizational structures and teaching/assessment methods that can actually get us there.  I'm not saying that we should replace all types of education with this kind of centralized and industrialized mass education, but we also shouldn't romanticize on-campus higher educational practices either.

I've been thinking about the intersection of two book chapters that we read as part of a course I'm taking on globalization and lifelong learning.

The first is by David Geoffrey Smith. He talks about the problems created when we approach teaching as if our students were being prepared for a "frozen future" -- in other words, they are being prepared to apply what they learned at some future date to a world that looks (essentially) just as things are now.  This is a particular problem when we talk about technology skills that become outdated so quickly.

The second chapter is by Dan Beveridge.  He talks about economic globalization and sustainability, which is closely related to the topic that my group is going to present in class in a couple of weeks (green/environmental movements).  Like most of the articles that I'm reading about globalization and environmental issues, this chapter discusses the kinds of things that we need to do so 6 billion people can live in a sustainable way on this planet.

Here is my problem: assuming that we can reduce emissions and create technologies that make our use of resources more efficient -- so 6 billion people can live sustainably on this planet -- the population isn't going to stay at 6 billion.  Animal populations are typically limited by biological and environmental factors: food sources, predators, habitat, disease, and the ability to find a mate.  We humans are conquering all of these areas.  We are finding ways to produce more food.  We have no predators.  We can live anywhere on the planet. We are making huge medical advances including fighting disease and reproductive technology.

Even if we are sustainable at 6 billion, will we be sustainable at 9, 12, or 20 billion people?  This planet can't hold an infinite number of human beings and frankly, I don't want the situation to get to the point where we all squabble over the last few inches of land or mass starvation breaks out (more than it already does). 

This seems to be a taboo topic.  Even writing this, I am thinking about policies that could reduce the human population to 3 billion people over the next hundred years or so (through voluntary choices not to have more than 1-2 kids).  It seems a bit fascist to limit reproductive rights.  Who am I to tell people that they can't have 17 kids with more on the way?  Who am I to countermand God's command to be fruitful and multiply?  I'm not sure, but it seems to me that we've been fruitful enough. 

In any case, my point is that the equation needs to be balanced:

number of people X impact/person = sustainable impact that the planet can absorb

So we need to either keep reducing the impact for each person (through reduction, technology, etc...), cap or decrease the number of people, or find additional planets to colonize (which I don't see being a realistic option for a large number of people before we would hit 20 billion people here via unrestricted reproduction).

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is "Globalization and Lifelong Learning".  Two weeks ago, we were asked to work in small groups through one of the readings about lifelong learning and respond to some questions about the use of lifelong learning with some examples.  Our group responded and submitted our answers.  Fred (the professor running the course) responded back and pointed out that some of our examples didn't address globalization.

In my mind, globalization and lifelong learning weren't directly tied together so closely that you need to talk about one to understand the other.  Certainly that is true when you talk about national governments and responses to national crises, but does one of our Chinese classmate's story about her grandmother's study of Chinese characters have to do with globalization?  Certainly it is part of lifelong learning in my book. Is my podcasting hobby part of globalization?  I connect it closely with social media and with ideas like openness and transparency, but I don't see it as being part of globalization, even though we have audiences in several different countries.

When I think about globalization, it's usually in terms of economics, politics, and the environment.  When a company produces goods where the raw materials, manufacturing, assembly, and sale all happen in different countries, then that is part of globalization.  When a company tries to influence the politics of a country in order to get more favorable conditions, that is clearly part of globalization.  Leaders from around the globe get together to discuss the melting icecaps or disappearing islands, that is part of globalization.

If you draw more inclusive lines around the term "globalization", things get a bit more fuzzy, but potentially closer to home.  You could say that globalization is the destruction of time and space that allows interactions and exchanges regardless of location, then I suppose my podcasting falls within the globalization phenomenon.  But even so, globalization isn't the best instrument to bring to bear when investigating why I podcast, who listens, and how those connections take place.  Globalization at that level is too big to be of much use.

So instead, let's be more specific.  How about "globalization of informal education" or "globalization of media production".  At that point, it starts to make some sense to me.

What really helped me was reading a chapter written by Dan Beveridge (University of Regina), about economic globalization.  At one point, he talks about groups that gather to protest globalization, but I feel that they they aren't protesting all of globalization.  They are protesting elements of economic globalization that lead to oppressive governments, unfair distribution of wealth, child labor, and pollution.  After all, the protesters themselves certainly use tools that fall within the widely-drawn inclusive nature of the term globalization (web sites, e-mail lists, mass transportation, etc...).  This point doesn't escape people who are trying to criticize the protesters.

Beveridge's chapter also talks about economic globalization as the commodification and corporatization of everthing.  In that sense, my podcasts (which are personally produced and free) are in opposition to these large corporate economic forces.  So if podcasting is part of globalization as a general phenomenon, that leads me to the conclusion that globalization isn't a unified trend in one direction.  It has competing trends within it.

Several of the other authors that we have read so far have asked whether globalization is inevitable?  I think it is, barring any worldwide event or fundamentalist movement that would effectively take us back to the Dark Age.  But that doesn't mean that the specific trends within globalization are inevitable.