PerilPowerPoint.zip

tinyurl.com/perilpptpsu

• Date: Monday April 1, 2013
• Time: Noon - 1:00 PM
• Location: 202K Rider or Adobe Connect
• Registration
  • 202K: https://register4its.psu.edu/Public/ShowDetail.asp?scheduleid=111036
  • Adobe Connect: https://register4its.psu.edu/Public/ShowDetail.asp?scheduleid=111037

About Pack and Play

"Pack and Play" brownbags is a new brownbag event designed to explore different topics and facilitate creativity/problem solving. They are currently being administered by Kate Miffitt (kem32@psu.edu).

About Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis (SNA) is the study of analyzing social connections between individuals and how this contributes to the overall community structure. This session will introduce concepts of social network analysis such as centrality, outliers and brokers and applications of SNA in fields such as sociology, politics, linguistics and epidemology. The session will include a brainstorming discussion of how SNA can be incorporated into educational technology, particularly analytics.

References

• Social Network Analysis, A Brief Introduction
• Social Network Analysis Slideshare

Unfortunately interactive elements have been notorious for presenting problems to different audiences. The issue is generally making sure a blind user can see the answer once it's revealed. Fortunately, advances in CSS and browser technology allow one to create better self checks.

In fact, I've updated one self-check in a database tutorial so that the answer is disguised in a box where the color the text and background match - until a mouse or tab key hits it to reveal the answer.

Hiding and Revealing Answer

The answers are visually hidden and revealed based on CSS of the background color. In the "hidden" state, the text and background are the same color and in the revealed state, the colors are different.

To enact hover states, the entire answer was placed in a link tag. The crucial parts of the style are display:block (to make the link act like a paragraph box), text-decoration:none and matching the color and background-color attributes. Add padding and margins as needed.

View the CSS

Note that it doesn't necessarily "hide" text from blinder users on a screen reader, but since text is presented in linear order, that is not as serious an issue as it could be IMHO. I would however ensure that 1) the question is an H tag and that the answer text in the link begin with "Answer". And then you can hush the screen reader.

To reveal the answer, it's important to create an appropriate CSS for BOTH the a:hover (mouseover) and a:focus (keyboard focus). Here is the CSS below.

Tabindex

Assuming the answer is in a link, most browsers will allow you to tab right to the answer and hit ENTER or the DOWN ARROW (Chrome) to reveal the answer. But what about the question?

You could embed the question in a link, but another option is to embedd the tabindex="0" attribute in whatever tag the question lives in (it could be an H tag or P tag). The Tab Index is a signal to "stop here", but setting the value to "0" doesn't make any changes to order.

You can also add a tabindex to the answer, but since I buried it in A tag to use its hover effects, it's redundant. So let's look at the HTML for this.

View the HTML

The scariest part of course is that if the writing is good enough, not even Turnitin could detect the cheating because it's a custom, well-written essay....or is it?

Economist Dan Ariely has an interesting article in which he test drives a few essay services and finds less than satisfying results. Consider some of the issues he finds in these essays (for which he paid over $150).

• Non-grammatical English - as in possibly produced by a non-native speaker of English. You can see a sample quote below
• Low quality sources in citations
• Incorrect citation formats
• May include plagiarized content - the kind detectable by Turnitin.

I don't mean to say that the Shadow Scholar ever produced such shoddy results. But the Shadow Scholar may be starting to charge a much higher fee after this. I also don't mean to say that faculty can breath a sigh of relief. Students are still going to do what they do, and they need to be educated otherwise.

If there is one lesson we should all learn it is this:

There is harmless healing, when healers-cheaters and wizards offer omens, lapels, damage to withdraw, the husband-wife back and stuff. ... But these days fewer people believe in wizards.

—Anonymous (2012)

But what do instructional designers do? Distill important pedagogical topics and technology down to a simple list of tips for our client faculty. It's far from being constructivist and can lead to some misconceptions. But it's what our customers want. Not so different from undergraduate students.

Before we hang our heads in shame though, consider the factors of time and motivation. Deep learning is going take longer than the checklist un-deep learning, and there isn't always a visible payoff. And if there isn't a visible payoff, then you need to be interest....really, really interested.

Want to learn spelling?

So consider a topic everyone loves - the spelling rules of English. Traditionally this is taught as memorizing complicated lists or rules and vocabulary lists.

Were you bored? I know I was. Were you confused? You should be. Even after getting multiple degrees in linguist, there are words that I have trouble spelling.

It turns out that there is another way to learn spelling - learn how to spell other languages particularly Latin, French, Greek, Italian and German. But adding Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Arabic and a variety of African languages is also useful. For place names you should also add Dutch, Welsh, Irish and some native American languages.

Once I learned the spelling rules of these languages, my spelling improved considerably. That's because English adopts words with foreign spellings (vs. sensible languages like Welsh which change spelling to fit its phonetic spelling system).

How long did this take? At least four years to get all the Latin, French and Spanish in. After that each language is a lot quicker (about one semester max). In addition to improving my spelling, learning other languages (even a little bit) has been great for helping me understand history, the news, cooking, music theory and art. That actually IS a visible payoff.

And yet, I hear all the time how hard a foreign language is. ¿Quién quiere «deep learning» ahora? It's all so sad.

Be interested

You know, I didn't know I was going to have any words of wisdom until I started pulling this blog entry together, but through the power of metacognition, I have some to deliver. One is to learn to be interested.

Once upon a time, there were topics I found boring and incomprehensible...until I started learning more. They included spelling, accessibility, copyright law, economics, thermodynamics, nutrition, Egyptian mummies, Stonehenge, bees and many more. But as I read more, I realized they were interesting. Strange but true.

There are topics I still find "boring", but it's because I've been too lazy to investigate. Or I need to get some sleep.

Be interesting

From the the instructional side, I think the lesson is to be interesting. Most of us already know this, but it's important to remind ourselves of this from time to time. Anytime we dismiss our courses in accounting, statistics, or whatnot as "boring", we've lost our battle.

One corollary of this is that our instructors should be INTERESTED. Drafting instructors to teach something they are not currently passionate in leads to a lot of wasted time. Do they always have time to catch up before the students? Do they want to? Do you?

But the biggest question of all - do our students have the time? They should of course, but when I consider how many times I am asked to distill a complicated subject to a three-bullet point list, I can't blame them for acting just like busy adults. Monkey see, monkey do is still a valid learning pattern.

Sometimes, the checklist is the best we can do.

See the ANGEL and MathML entry for information getting the appropriate namespace version of MathML. ]]> http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/tlt/2012/10/mathml-in-drupal.html http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/tlt/2012/10/mathml-in-drupal.html MathML Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:24:23 -0500 One of the challenges of video captioning is that it does rely human intervention to achieve the most accurate results. That's because speech recognition is only reliable in certain circumstances, usually when the speaker has set up a profile on a Dragon speech recognition engine (this could include instructors BTW).

To achieve the best transcription in other circumstances though (and human listeners require 96-98% accuracy), you usually need a person to do one of the following:

1. Watch and transcribe a video
2. Watch a video and correct speech recognition errors (e.g. "Rest in Peas" for "Rest in Peace")
3. Have a videographer watch and repeat the words on the video through her or his trained speech recognition speech system

Note that all of the above assume that someone is spending time re-watching the video. Ugh!

Could an Easy Button be Coming?

What we are all waiting for is the captioning "Easy Button" that will allow use to upload any video file and presto - get back a reasonably accurate transcription regardless of the speaker.

The good news is that Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has been working on new speech recognition algorithms. Unlike previous systems, it appears that this one will include a little more old-fashioned phonetic and phonological information and won't be quite as reliant on statistical models.

It still might not be perfect. As with current systems, you will need high quality recordings so the right amount of phonetic information can be retrieved. I suspect that any speaker outside known linguistic parameters (e.g. a speaker with an undocumented accent) will still be able to throw off the system.

But I am glad that linguistics is being included in the solution.

Just to briefly describe the tool, Grademark allows instructor to drag comments onto a paper (like the well-known "¶" and "Awk." comments of writing instructors. However, this tool allows instructors to create their own comments, and this is where badgification could come in.

Suppose I am teaching a linguistics course and want to reward the extra effort in a piece of linguistic writing. I could use light hearted comments to reward students for going the extra mile. For instance, if a student included non-English data with the correct accent marks or in an authentic script, they could get the "Script Master" badge, while those who record audio could get a "Podcaster" badge.

It's not a full badge system, but it's a way to leverage a feedback system to be a little more badge like.

Browser Support

Before testing you want to make sure you are working with the right browsers and have the right fonts and players installed. So for MathML you will need

• Firefox 4+ (Best native support)
• Internet Explorer 9 + MathPlayer 3
• Safari 5.1+ (Limited native support)
• MathML font like STIX (free)

Note that Chrome did not support MathML natively as of Sept 28, 2012.

Getting MathML Code

For the moment, I recommend using raw MathML code if you want to experiment. Where do you get MathML code? It can be exported an equation editor like MathType or MathMagic. You can start to learn more about these editors on my MathML Tutorial page.

BTW - The ANGEL equation editor default setting appears to insert an image based on MathML code, but it's still an image. This is OK, so long as you changed the ALT tag to be something understandable on a screen reader. Right now the default ALT tag is "mathml equation".

First Try: HTML Editor

My first attempt was to cut and paste sample MathML code into the ANGEL HTML Editor in source view. This works great for modern versions of Firefox and Safari, but unfortunately NOT Internet Explorer. Sigh.

Second Try: Upload HTML 5 File

My second try was to upload an HTML 5 with MathML file into ANGEL via a File Upload. This did work, but I had to make sure I was using the right MathML markup for Internet Explorer, specifically "namespace mark up" in which the initial <math> tag includes the link to the MathML specification. That is:

<math xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML'>

CSS and MathML

If you really want to impress yourself, you can combine MathML with CSS. For instance, I use CSS to enlarge equations embedded in the MATH tag to font-size: 1.5em as follows:

math {font-size: 1.5em; font-style:normal}

Ready for Prime Time?

The fact that I got a MathML posted into the ANGEL environment is good news, but it still requires the developer/ID/instructor to be comfortable working with HTML source view.

If the instructor is NOT comfortable with this, but can use an equation editor, the best option might be to export an equation as an image and insert it with an ALT tag. Fortunately, It is possible to insert images into ANGEL with an Alternative Tag.

Art Work and Tone

One way in which the two differ is the presentation or artwork style. Traditionally, a badge is relatively small and may have some sort of symbolic artwork on it. Here are some examples from Mozilla School of Webcraft, FourSquare and Kyle Peck. Styles of awards and award merit language arrange from very professional to 100% outrageous ("Player please?" Oh, please!")

In contrast, certificates are much more serious in tone. They often feature old-fashioned type faces and official logos (and signatures). The content typically marks the user's accomplishment and the time the certficate was issued in very formal language (sometimes in Latin). They are meant to be official acknowledgements from respected institutions that some achievement has been noted.

Already the styles are very different in terms of tone. It shouldn't matter, but it's something to consider when considering badgification.

I should add here that a badge logo could go to a certificate type description. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Granularity

Something else to consider is granularity. In many systems, a badge is awarded for a specific accomplishment, while certificates may be awarded for a larger scale accomplishment.

For instance, the TWT Certificate program awards one certificate for completing a portfolio which contains a set of elements (e.g. a teaching philosophy statement, example presentation...). But could a set of supplementary badges be included? I was thinking of one for accessibility, but we could include multimedia creation, exceptional use of a tool like Voicethread, ANGEL or the blogs or something similar. Badges could be a way to further personalize the experience or even provide stepping stones to the final certificate.

Badges and Certificates Together

As with any new system it's worth looking back to previous analogues to see if we can learn anything. Certificates are a known model here at Penn State. What should be adapted for badges? What should be discarded?

The good news is that I am being exposed to some very interesting and beautiful musical pieces. The bad news is that now it comes with a heavier burden of trying to reconcile innocent musical pleasure with the real world repercussions that musicians from many minority cultures face.

Breaking Hearts

To give you an idea of our World Music course so far, I can tell you that:

• Week 1 pointed out that few listeners of popular Gregorian chant understand how it relates to an actual monastic ritual
• Week 2 pointed out that on Paul Simon's Graceland album, some of the African musicans felt slighted. Some songs also de-Africanized the original recordings quite a bit.

OK....I wanted to learn more about world music, but did I want to learn this much? Maybe not, but I do have to acknowledge that I have enjoyed Gregorian chants without absolutely no thought of honoring the original intent. It's all about the soothing music.

This is an issue faced by teachers in many related disciplines including linguistics. In linguistics I often to explain:

• Double negatives aren't really bad grammar - just rejected by the elite (that's élite).
• Tracing linguistics and archaeology - except when it re-ignites an ethnic conflict.
• And my favorite - just because a language doesn't have pronouns for "he" and "she" does NOT mean their society has eliminated gender discrimination.

Yikes! If you were hoping to just learn a little bit of etymology or a few dialect words in my class, you are going to be disappointed.

Mending Hearts?

Does this mean that I'm asking you to give up the joys of Shakespeare and Jane Austen? Or the joys of listening to Graceland and meditative chant? Actually it doesn't. What I want, and what I think the Coursera World Music instructors want is to develop alternative points of view, even if it's a little painful. It is a reality that we are educating students so that they can enter into different spheres of influence. Is it any wonder we want them to do "right" when they get there?

At this point, I can appreciate the Gregorian chant albums, and also the parodies? Sometimes maturity means understanding irony. And I do admit that learning about this cultural context of different world musics helps me understand them more than I would just listening naively. In fact, I had an interesting insight into opera recently which I had previously loathed. I can't promise I will be a fan, but I could probably appreciate a performance now if I had to experience it.

However, as instructors we also have to recognize that the views we are trying to change are not always maliciously meant. I'm someone who instinctively enjoys music without trying to understand the lyrics. Does that make me a bad person?

Many white Americans are interested in focusing on tracing their origins back to ancient Scotland or Anglo-Saxon England because it is an authentic part of their past. Aren't we all interested in our own history?

I do think it's important to expose mainstream students (code for white students in the U.S.) to alternative points of view without overburdening them with so much guilt they can't appreciate the positives of their own cultures. It's just as important as helping minority cultures understand their own positive accomplishments without being overly burdened with a tragic destiny. A little bittersweetness for everyone?

A Good Role Model

A person who's done a really good of this balancing act is Henry Louis Gates. If you haven't seen his PBS series Finding Your Roots you are missing good television.

The first series traces the geneology of various celebrities ranging from Kevin Bacon and Martha Stewart to Condaleeza Rice and Linda Chavez. The most amazing facts and stories came out and almost all of it was a mix of good and bad. Almost everyone had a juicy skeleton in the closet (there's been a lot of interacial mixing in our history), but also learned amazing revelations at what their ancestors did accomplish.

By the way, the person whose European ancestors arrived the earliest in North America ended up being Linda Chavez whose roots were from New Mexico. Her family arrived when it was still a colony of Spain and remained there even as the Mexican border got pushed much further south. They were also influential in the area for many generations.

It is a good fact to remember when thinking about the complexity of our relations with Latin America.

It Sounds Like English

With very rare exceptions, a word can enter a language only if follows the rules for permissible combinations of consonants and vowels. For instance "accessify" and "access" follow the rules, but something like "bcess" or "bccefmgi" would not.

It Uses an English Word Formation Rule

The suffix -ify is a suffix used to make new verbs out of nouns like accessibility or mystery (mystify). acid (acidify) and even class (classify). The suffix -ify isn't the only option. Another more common suffix is -(r)ize, but "accessorize" is too ambiguous to be useful.

It's on Google!

The previous two characteristics apply to possible words, but the question "Is accessify a word?" is also asking if it's used, preferably by someone who knows about accessibility. And the Google search results confirm that people are using "accessify" quite a bit, especially the people at accessify.comand Accessify Forum.

Still the Doubt...

And yet...this word is not accepted everywhere. For instance, it is not yet listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word "accessify" is still working its way through social channels.

I have faith in it though. If there's one thing accessibility can use it's a verb that explains the process of optimizing documents and tools for accessibility concisely and clearly.

Note: The Sloan Consortium (aka Sloan-C) is an organization devoted to "quality online instruction. Penn State is a member, so anyone at ETS can establish an account and access many of the online services. The Merlot repository is a curated collection of learning objects and Websites. Certain Penn State ETS Websites have been included in the past.

Accessibility

The issue of accessibility was on Sloan-C and Merlot's mind as both organizations worked to provide information and future infrastructure to member institutions. Merlot has established an accessibility information area at http://oeraccess.merlot.org/ and Sloan-C hopes to also start a special interest group. The National Federation of the Blind co-presented a session as part of this effort.

Drexel sponsored a particularly compelling session featuring students needing accommodation. Each spoke about his or needs and challenges. Two interesting cases were a woman with carpal tunnel and another with a speech production deficit. The second student mentioned video recording assignments were very time consuming because he could not just record his thoughts on the fly, but had to edit his recording based on multiple attempts.

Good news for Penn State - the moderator of the student panel pointed out http://accessibility.psu.edu as a quality resource.

My session was a tutorial for instructors and instructional designers and was nominated for a Best in Track and a Sloan-C Best Practice award.

The Place of the MOOC

Probably the biggest focus of the conference was the role of MOOCs and badges and how they are impacting traditional academia. There was certainly plenty of buzz, but also concern that MOOCs not be a regression to the old information dump model.

Two speakers from the Khan Academy demoed their Art HIstory site which is a comprehensive suite of video lectures on different art history topics. I will admit that the content is well done (although they need captions), but it is essentially a well-performed lecture.

On the other hand, an instructor who does not have access to information on certain art periods could find these invaluable. And Devil's Advocate - a lecture (i.e. a well structured informative narrative) is a very effective method to present the context to help students understand historical content (this is Art History).

When presented with (ahem) a human instructor, the videos can also be good points of departure for further discussion. And even if a student is working independently, viewing more than one discussion of any period would be essential towards gaining the multiple perspectives needed.

I think the interesting question is when does a person need to interact more fully with humans instead of just books and videos.

Just to expand on that, I do think learning from resources like these is an important skill - sometimes you just can't get to an SME. In fact, all the Cornish (a Celtic language) I have learned was from books. There are just NO Breton courses in the U.S.

On the other hand, if I really wanted to be a Cornish expert, I would have to interact with human Cornish language experts, most of whom are in the U.K. This may be where Skype and e-mail become the crucial technologies...although I would never say no to a trip to the Cornwall coast.

Motivation

On a side note, while I was attending a session about the needs for students to have rich, meaningful interactions with content within a context of a community of practice the following question occurred to me - What happens when a student doesn't want to bother with all that?

Depending on what I am teaching (phonetics, accessibility, copyright law...) I often hear students/administrators/busy faculty ask "Can you just list what I need to know on a single page?" It's usually because the person is not especially interested in a topic but is forced by circumstances to deal with it. Motivation is definitely an important element of learning.

Will I be able to persuade everyone needing to learn accessibility to be an "a11y" guru monitioring multiple listservs and attending webinars? Probably not. But that's not the level of expertise needed...or is it?

My Takeaways

The theme of the conference is open resources, but the question continues to be what kind of open resource? I think a number of viable models are available, but any design needs to consider which one is the best.

Ultimately the most common model will probably be the "content" model in which a content provider posts information to a Website for others to freely use. This is the model of Wikipedia, YouTube knitting videos and the Kahn academy. When done well, this is an effective means of distributing unique content cheaply and efficiently.

Note: I would agree that putting up a set of lecture notes is NOT good design even in this model because they have not been edited for a remote audience who cannot communicate directly with the instructor.

There is another model that's important and that is one that allows for students to interact with each other. This has the potential for expanding the student experience, but I find that the logistics have to be thought VERY CAREFULLY.

One version of this model is the topic Listserv, but as research has shown, this format is often dominated by a small percentage of active users and a large percentage of lurkers...just as in any large classroom.

Another model breaks out a MOOC community into smaller discussion groups, but if that is not planned well, students can get frustrated very quickly, as seen in this rambling blog entry of my experience of the New Media Reader MOOC experiment and more in my October 2010 archives. In order for this model to work, there has to be a method to ensure that group leaders are confident with the material. If not, then the group leader might want to bring in some back up doughnuts.

An possible model to look at might be the bookclub model in which pre-framed questions are given to reading groups. Is this too dumbed down though or is the structure needed?