Recently in Teaching with Technology Category

Chas recently invited me to talk to faculty and graduate students during one of our Course in College Teaching (CCT) sessions.  I discussed a wide variety of technologies available to Penn State instructors from a wide variety of units (see the 1-page resource document). I spent a good portion of the time showing different pedagogy approaches using blogs, wikis, video and games for teaching and learning. 

Some interesting questions from the group (some I could not answer unfortunately):

- How does intellectual property work if I'm designing a course in the blog or wiki platform for online delivery?

- How do I know if my students are plagiarizing or using copyrighted material in video projects?

- How do I decide whether to use a blog or a wiki in my course?

I was able to tackle the final question, mostly because it's a pedagogy question; it depends on what you're trying to get across to your students or have them learn.  That will likely dictate which platform you use.  Both the blog and wiki platform overlap in my mind, in terms of the things you can do with them.  I've seen Science Education courses using the blog as the centerpiece of the course, and I've seen the exact same use in Psychology courses but using a wiki. 

I'm unsure about how IP works, and from my days in IST and elsewhere I get the feeling that is a case-by-case scenario, depending on how the instructor is being compensated for creating the course.  The question dealing with copyrighted material in videos...I can't really think of a good way to decipher if your students are using copyrighted material or no.  Any suggestions?

Microsft founder Bill Gates recently spoke on the topic of higher education in an interview.  Bill believes that the web, not a single university, will provide the best education in the future. 

"Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university,"

Bill doesn't come out and say it directly, but he hints at a world where 'learners' can get everything they need in terms of an education from the web, without enrolling in a university (even an online university).  I'm not sure I buy into this, but I do think we can find ways, via technology, to link students from PSU with, say, students from Michigan, other Big Ten schools, Ivy leagues schools and even universities around the world.  We already support exchange student programs, why not work out a way to support students that want to take a specific course PSU does not offer, but another university in the Big Ten does?  Penn State is already doing something similar to this with the elearning cooperative, helping students at all PSU campuses interact within a course supported by technology. 

The second issue that jumped to mind after reading a highlight of Bill's interview is the role of the instructor.  In the last 5-7 years, I believe the instructor (in certain contexts and courses) is better suited to act more as a facilitator than the traditional 'fountain of knowledge.'  The idea that the student's mind is an empty glass and the instructor is the individual responsible for filling it feels dated.  In some courses, this model is necessary.  But in other courses, acting as a facilitator, encouraging and motivating students to be responsible for their own learning, feels like a much more powerful method to engage students. Following Bill's logic, a student simply learning on the web has no facilitator, no knowledge expert to address questions or encourage the student to explore different knowledge areas.  The instructor will always be a key figure in higher education, although the skillsets required to be a great instructor might be changing...

Today, an article in InsideHigher (see: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/28/copyright) discussed how professors will now have an easier time showing videos in class for academic use.

Per the article:

"One change in particular is making waves in academe: an exemption that allows professors in all fields and "film and media studies students" to hack encrypted DVD content and clip "short portions" into documentary films and "non-commercial videos." (The agency does not define "short portions.")

This means that any professors can legally extract movie clips and incorporate them into lectures, as long as they are willing to decrypt them -- a task made relatively easy by widely available programs known as "DVD rippers.""

As far as general video resources go for faculty, here are some options that are popular for classroom use:

http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm

http://www.teachersdomain.org/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/

http://www.learner.org/index.html

In today's InsideHigherEd posting, see: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/07/27/arvan), Lanny Arvan poses very interesting thoughts on the use of blogs as a teaching method. I highly recommend this article for professors who are considering using blogs in their classes. I like the fact that it dovetails with Chickering's and Gamson's Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.

The presentation slides from the Learning Design Summer Camp are now available in PDF format. I'm working on the first draft of the actual report and I'll be posting a link in the next few weeks where people can go do download that document. 

Some really good questions and ideas were discussed during the session. Many folks were interested in the number of blogs and wikis that are being used for educational vs. other purposes.  Unfortunately, that's not something we can determine from the quantitative data; that will take a good chunk of time for someone to determine a random sample then go out and visit each URL to classify the usage of each space.  We are hoping to get to that, but it won't be any time in the near future. 

A few notes of interest from the presentation:

• When examining instructor use of both platforms, 'Professor', 'Associate Professor', and 'Assistant Professor' make up nearly 50% of all instructor usage of Wikispaces.  Those three categories of instructors make up ~25% of all instructor usage of Blogs @ PSU. One reason could be the flexibility of Wikispaces to be used for things like project management and research collaboration.  Another reason cited numerous times related to IP; it appears that faculty see Wikispaces as a much more secure space for their intellectual capital (but the Blogs @ PSU platform does allow individuals to create protected blog spaces).
• When examining blogging characteristics and cumulative GPA of student bloggers, we see a significant difference between students that are infrequent users of the blog platform compared to those that tend to be entry-dominant users (creating several entries across several blogs, and staying active in the blog platform). When we examine pure means of these groups, the infrequent users experience a .01 increase in GPA from the time they first entered the blog platform to their most recent activity, where entry-dominant bloggers experience a .06 increase in GPA.
• Both these platforms can play an interesting role in elearning at PSU.  Some folks are using Wikispaces as an elearning platform, which is an interesting idea if faculty do not have a design team to help launch an elearning course.  Biology 110 appears to be fully built-out in Wikispaces (PSU authentication required).  In terms of open courseware initiatives, faculty are creating some incredibly powerful online materials in both Wikispaces and Blogs @ PSU that Penn State needs to begin thinking about how these resources might be leveraged to enhance the breadth and depth of education across the system.

Please let me know if the PDF of the slides does not open properly.  For some reason I experienced troubles opening the file, but other colleagues indicate it works fine.

I found an interesting article in the Chronicle today titled "Is Technology Making Your Students Stupid?", a short interview with Nicholas Carr, a Colorado writer.  Overall, it's an interesting read.  Carr has a psychology background, and comes at the topic from the school of thought that the brain is malleable and adaptable through life experiences, something often referred to as neuroplasticity.  Carr sites many observations regarding the use of technology in learning contexts, focusing primarily on studies and anecdotes that found things like multitasking and using laptops in classrooms hurts student learning.  One very interesting finding he mentions is the use of online archives for academic journals.  Carr points out that, in some instances, this is hurting academia, mostly research, as a whole.  The idea is that we, as researchers using online search to find journals, are increasingly led to the same citations based on popularity.

"...we become so dependent on search, and the results from searches are determined by popularity of one sort or another. And the risk of using search for online research is that everybody gets led in the same directions to a smaller number of citations which, as they become ever more popular, become the destination for more and more searches."

The article touches briefly on social media, where Carr simply wants to make sure educators aren't making assumptions that all social media is good for education.  This leads me to some numbers we've uncovered with our research into the use of blogs@PSU. We ran a cluster analysis on the the student blog data, which led to three distinct groups:

• Infrequent users
• Comment-dominant users
• Entry-dominant users

When we begin to examine the GPA of these users, we see that infrequent users average a 3.21, comment-dominated users a 3.38, and entry-dominant users a 3.56.  Now, this isn't saying that blogs lead to better GPAs; rather the reverse.  People with high GPAs tend to post more entries in the blog space.  We took a smaller sample from this data, examining students using the blogs that were admitted to PSU in Fall 07. We then examined when these students began blogging, placed each student into one of the above 3 groups, and examined their GPA curve over time.  We haven't completed the analysis yet, but it does appear that entry-dominant users, from the time they start blogging, start to see positive gains to GPA. 

We're working on a report now that details some of this information as well as data on the use of PSU's wikispaces. Stay tuned for the release of the first draft towards the end of the summer.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/07/avatars

I just received a link to this EDUCAUSE Research Bulletin about Google Wave as a way to foster "computer based collaborative learning"--intriguing!

EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research

Google Wave and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: Impact on Higher Education
by Johanna Hane
Research Bulletin 13, 2010

Abstract: This ECAR research bulletin is based on a 2010 study that was conducted as part of an examination assignment in the course "Introduction to Communication, Learning, and IT" at a Swedish university (Gothenburg). The study focused on the potential benefits and drawbacks of Google Wave for educational purposes. Study participants' discussions were observed and analyzed in conjunction with literature on computer-supported collaborative learning and the social constructivist view on education.

Cindy passed around a recent study conducted by the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA).  They asked 200 students at the University of Maryland to go without any technology for 24 hours.  No cell phones, computers, television, iPod, and even radio or newspapers.  The study reports some very interesting comments from students, many focusing on the feeling of isolation, both from friends and also from sources of information related to news or current events. 

The question we are exploring deals with students as employees.  On one hand, some worry that this attachment to technology might hinder attention spans, multi-tasking and productivity.  On the other hand, the companies that successfully integrate both the technologies and the habits of those that use them into organizational workflows will be at a huge advantage and discover new efficiencies.  What do you think about the level of reliance on technology we see in today's student, and how will that transfer to a new employee?

I recently stumbled onto a great dialog around a New York Times article titled 'We have the met the enemy and he is PowerPoint'.  The articles goes into detail about various uses of PPT, particularly in the military, and how it is often abused.  This sparked Ron Burns, CEO or virtual world platform provider Proton Media, to post some thoughts on leveraging 3-D spaces vs. 2-D PPTs in many situations.  Ron's post then prompted some other industry folks from the likes if Microsoft and Cisco to weigh in on the discussion of PPT vs. 3-D alternatives. 

You can read all the blog posts in the discussion over on Proton Media's blog.

Personally, I do see and agree with a lot of their points.  But the roadblocks for the shift are rather large:

• Time to develop a similar message in a 3D space is longer, especially for those without experience.
• The comfort factor of PPT.  People create PPT presentations frequently and (arguably) know the tool.
• Custom software required for both presenters and audience members, including account creation processes, if using 3D software.
  

We're still going to see continued growth in the 3D space in business and education, but we have some early hurdles that need addressed for most of our audiences to get past the early adopter phase.