June 2009 Archives

Portfolio as Symphony

By Jeff Swain on June 29, 2009 1:13 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Today I'm headed to Harrisburg with Glenn Johnson. Glenn is doing a half-day workshop with faculty on the potential of blogs. Since I am assuming Glenn's role in the initiative, he was kind enough to invite me along.

In reviewing the faculty requests for the workshop the needs cover the entire portfolio spectrum. Some are looking to begin building their own portfolio site, others are interested in how they can use blogs and portfolios with their students, and some are interested in how blogs can be used for purposes of accreditation. All important areas.

I'm anxious to hear what folks have to say. Why they are interested in using blogs. What they. would like to do with them. How they see blogs fitting in with their teaching and learning style and curriculum.

I've been doing a lot of reading in and around the topic portfolios and I'm trying to come up with a synthesis of thought. I believe we need to create a product and a style that accommodates those needs mentioned above but that, more importantly, comes together in a way that enables something greater to happen. I guess, to use an analogy, I'm thinking of a symphony. How can I help make these disparate pieces play together in concert? What sort of behind the scenes technical work needs to be done? What should this user interface look like? What kinds of teaching and outreach needs to be done?

I'm only at the beginning. I'm hoping by attending today's session I can glean additional insight to our needs and therefore begin to formulate how we can best address them. I have no answers only questions.Any feedback, comments, suggestions, ideas, or resources you can point me toward would be greatly appreciated. 

Work as Play

By Jeff Swain on June 29, 2009 9:33 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
My in-laws recently tore down their old garage. An old wooden slab structure that was falling in upon itself, it hadn't been fit for a car in years but instead had become a storage place of those things that become unneeded but not thrown away.

One of the several treasures that emerged from the tear down was a child's toy. A miniature table saw made of metal and powerful enough to cut Balsam Wood when loaded with three C batteries. Built to scale, about half the size of a toaster, the saw could be raised and lowered for depth of cut and the table could be titled by degrees for angled cuts. The detail was incredible. The blade was driven by a mini rubber belt which spun on two wheels that could be tightened with a miniature wrench when they came loose from spinning the blade.

I wish I would have taken a picture because the toy is an excellent representation using play to prepare a child preparing for work. Judging by the packaging, the toy was obviously being marketing to a boy and based by the attention to detail, the toy assumed that the boy would most likely need this skill for later in life, either professionally or for work around the house.

Play always was, and still is preparation for life. And not just for humans. Ever see video of lion cubs wrestling or a bear cup imitating the hunting practices of its mother?

It got me to thinking, what kinds of play kids participate in today that prepares them for life skills in such a direct manner? The first example that jumped to mind is video games. Studies suggest that time spent playing video games help with problem-solving ability, the ability to feel empathy, to work in teams, and to see the interconnectedness between disparate things. And, many of the web-based tools out there, such as blogs, photo editing, video and music production, prepare kids to use many of these same skills as well as get them accustomed to giving and receiving feedback in to just the practical but also affective domains.

Another great element of play today is that it's no longer expected to end with childhood. Play is no longer childish but rather, many disciplines today require adults to maintain a child like sense of wonder and enjoyment through play in order for them to be productive contributors. In fact I think it is one of our responsibilities in higher ed. is to prepare our students in how to play as adults.

Faith of the Agnostic

By Jeff Swain on June 29, 2009 9:15 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
He never understood those who claimed not to have faith. Faith was everywhere. The cosmos reeked of it. The faith of others is what got you a job, mortgage, love. You needed faith in the world to get out of bed and faith in something else to fall asleep at night.

The Splinter

By Jeff Swain on June 29, 2009 9:04 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
He got the splinter from the table out back the day he buried her. Cancer. Each night for two weeks since, he sat at the table with a lighter, pin, and tweezers trying to dig the goddamn thing out of his purple, throbbing thumb. Thinking if he could everything would be alright.

A Cup of Coffee

By Jeff Swain on June 26, 2009 10:41 AM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks
A cup of coffee in the morning is the only thing keeping him grounded. It's his tether. Sometimes he grips the mug with both hands to keep from flying off into space and into the great beyond. He dreads the day the automatic timer doesn't kick on, paralyzed by the inevitable.

The Dreamer

By Jeff Swain on June 26, 2009 10:33 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
He was always a dreamer. A thinker of big thoughts. His problem was he was always paralyzed by fear. No doubt the result of losing his parents when he was a child. Both gone within his first decade. Now, age sixty-eight, he wonders if he can climb out of bed.

Her Favorite Jeans

By Jeff Swain on June 26, 2009 8:02 AM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks
Her favorite jeans fit just right at the hip and curve where she curves. Their soft like a babies blanket. In them she is invincible. She was wearing them the first time she truly fell in love and, shortly after, the first time she felt the power of breaking another's heart. 

Aesthetics and Instructional Design

By Jeff Swain on June 25, 2009 3:18 PM | 2 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Is there an aesthetic component to the design of instruction? I've been wrestling with this notion the last few days. Not that I don't think there is. On the contrary I firmly believe there is a relationship. What I'm struggling with is how to articulate what I'm thinking. So here it goes.

Aesthetics are concerned with the study of beauty. We determine something to be beautiful based on our sensory, emotional, and intellectual response to it. As a general rule we make this determination immediately and simultaneously (on all three levels). Therefore, an aesthetic response is a response to the whole. 

Let me illustrate with an example. For Valentine's Day my wife gave me a special order iPod (Product) Red nano. I loved it from the moment I laid eyes on it. From the brushed metallic cherry red finish, to the way it fit into the palm of my hand, to the incredible definition of the small screen, it was something that, from the first moment, I knew would work for me. My nano is more than the function it was made to do (play audio and video). It is a work of art. A thing of beauty.

So what does that have to do with the design of instruction? Unfortunately, it serves as a non-example. We instructional designers are not trained to think in these terms. We're trainined not to think in wholes but in component parts. If the parts work the whole must be fine. We breaks things down into pieces, parts, and components. We're so preoccupied with the trees we have no sense of the forest.

Now let's flip that. When a student comes into a learning environment you designed how are they approaching it? Are they seeing the component parts you worked so hard at or are the seeing an entity that may or may not resemble a Frankenstein monster? My guess is the latter.

We subconsciously associate beauty with value. If something is beautiful it must be valuable. And, ostensibly, we seek to learn because we want something greater for ourselves than just having our base needs met. The learner is coming to us seeking a form of transcendance. To move from who they are to who they desire to be. They are looking for value. So why don't we design our instruction that way?

Oh Crap

By Jeff Swain on June 24, 2009 7:25 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Wait! It's not what you think. This is good crap. This is crap that can help. The crap I'm talking about is an acronym for the four design principles espoused by Robin Williams (crap, not the one you're think of) in her book, The Non-Designer's Design Book.

Crap (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) is about good design, whether your designing for the web or for print, Williams provides practical advice that is easy to understand. In fact she's so good at explaining things you'll end up kicking yourself for not figuring it out on your own. Trust me, it's not that obvious; she's that good.

But what I really like about the book is how it makes me think about every aspect of design. Now I think about how everything in my design is interconnected and nothing arbitrary. Each element has a purpose and a place and if a component does not connect with at least one other element you need to question it's value to the piece. I learned that it's not the sum of the parts that make the greater whole but, rather, it's the sum of the right parts operating together that make the whole piece greater.

Not to get to philosophical about it but I came away thinking that the ultimate message of the book was "with unity comes harmony." Not just with the design of an artifact but rather with the design of life.

Me, The Imperfect Story

By Jeff Swain on June 24, 2009 4:42 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
My blog site tells the story of me during a particular span of my life. Everything about this space, from what I chose to write about, to the format, to the color scheme, to the media I use, says something about who I am, whether I consciously think along these line or not. In fact, one of the reasons I like this blog the best out of all my (failed) others is because I finally understand that. When you think of it this understanding seems obvious but, it's not.

Story underpins everything. It's how we best remember things, it's how we explain ourselves, and it's how we look into the future to see potential events. We've been telling stories since our beginning yet, we, for the most part, we don't teach how to tell a story. We operate under the assumption that everyone instinctively knows how to tell a story. But is that right?

Take the Wordle art that I use as my banner on the Home page. Each of those words is meant to convey something I want the world to know about me. In a sense, they are my declaration of being. To quote Whitman, they are my  "barbaric yawp" from the rooftops. I put a lot of thought into the words I wanted displayed, their size and placement because I wanted them to represent the best image of me I could muster. Six months ago I do not think I would have gotten that which explains why my other attempts at this sort of thing failed miserably. It wasn't because I didn't know how to use the technology; it was because I didn't understand how to tell my story, regardless of the technology.

So my question is, do we need to teach our students how to tell stories?

Chris Long, one of our Faculty Fellows this summer, recently did a podcast with two of the folks he'll be working with on the topic of creating a digital dialogue. It's about 20 minutes in length and worth listening to (click here to go to the podcast). Chris is a philosopher so it was not surprise that at one point during the podcast to discuss the Greek Philosopher's understanding of "Excellence". Excellence to them was anything done with perfect balance.

Chris related this idea of excellence to his interest in openness, and in his example he talked about openness on the web. He used Twitter and what people chose to share there to illustrate his point. The extremes, of course, are those who share nothing on one end and those who share everything on the other. By Chris's definition, excellence in openness lies in between the two. The closer to the middle the better. I agree with that.

Without knowing it, that idea of excellence in openness was precisely what I was trying to do with my Wordle banner. Whether I achieved my goal or not remains to be seen but the point is now that I'm consciously aware that I'm telling my story my chances of successfully communicating with the world are much better.

This all got me to thinking that while we're teaching our students how to communicate we should also teach them how to tell their story, no matter the medium. Or am I merely projecting my own needs onto them?


Saving Face

By Jeff Swain on June 22, 2009 8:34 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks
Michael Caine's 1992 autobiography, "What's It All About" is a good read. A passage that is one of my favorites is about  a bit of advice he received from the author and director James Clavell one day after he {Caine} lost hos temper while shooting the movie The Last Valley.

In the scene Michael Caine is on a horse that is supposed to be going at a trot. Well, the trot breaks into a gallop and soon he finds himself hanging on for dear life. Eventually, they bring the horse under control and upon dismounting he goes on this terrific tirade. When he's finished Clavell takes him aside and tell him this:

"You must never lose face...With your display of temper just now you did exactly that... Not only have you lost your face, but it will remain lost with these particular people in this situation and you will not regain it until the project ends...You belittle and demean yourself by showing such a great and personal emotion in front of people whom you do not know intimately, and the loss of control shows the other person that you are weak...If you cannot control yourself, who can you control?"
 from "What's It All About?", pg 305

Where did Clavell learn such wisdom? From his captors. He was a Japanese prisoner of war during WWII. When I think of all the times I was quick to anger, and how trivial they were especially where you compare it to what Clavell faced, I am ashamed.

That One Thing

By Jeff Swain on June 22, 2009 2:19 PM | 2 Comments | 0 TrackBacks


I was at a marketing seminar last month where the presenter showed a short video clip from a movie I had not seen in a long time. The movie is City Slickers and the scene is where Curly Washburn (Jack Palance) imparts the secret of life to a lost Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) while they are out riding horses. To sum, Curly asks Mitch if he knows what the secret of life is and when Mitch replies he doesn't, Curly holds up his index finger and says "One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit." When Mitch asks Curly what that one thing is Curly replies, "That's what you got to figure out."

It got me thinking about what that one thing is for me? I came to this conclusion: I am an instructional designer. My job at it's core is to create optimal learning environments for my clients. In this role I am part project manager, part researcher, part creator, part teacher, part team builder, part evaluator. In other words, I am an architect of opportunity. By synthesizing  technology and cognitive science along with human needs and behaviors I create something that hitherto did not exist. Done right, it's a work of art.  

It's easy to forget this when you're caught up in the day-to-day machinations of things. And, when I forget, I tend to get lost. As a result, I expend too much time and effort on the most trivial matters that ultimately have no bearing on the grand scheme of things. This is when my career stalls and I become unhappy. If I am to be successful I need to remember that one thing, at my core, I am an instructional designer. That is the value I bring to any situation, no matter my title or level. If I do this I think I will see success and professional happiness beyond what I imagine because I am being me. Everything else will take care of itself.

Are Instructional Designers, "Designer's"?

By Jeff Swain on June 22, 2009 7:23 AM | 4 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Are instructional designers truly designers? I've been asking myself this question a lot lately. Do we design instruction or are we just content arrangers.

A designer, as I see it, is someone who can take disparate things and turn them into something beneficial, something that not only serves the needs of others but also provides meaning, or better yet, enables the end user to create their own meaning. Therefore, good design should be a combination of practical utility and aesthetics. Form does follow function. However, it is the form that fires the imagination. Form is where significance lies; it is where meaning is created. We live in the form. Form is where the soul is touched.

"Design, stripped to its essence, can be defined as the human nature to shape and make our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs and give meaning to our lives."
John Heskett

As designers of instruction we should be creating environments that allow meaning making to happen.  That is the art that we bring or, rather, that we should be bringing. But more often than not we focus on the utilitarian end of things to the point of excluding form. How often, when putting a course together, do we stop and think about the inter-relationship among the parts? Do the parts come together to form a greater whole, one where something meaningful can occur or are they really just parts and the only thing that makes them whole is they occur in the same course space?

"Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology , cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing."
Paola Antonell, curator of architecture and design, MoMa

The difference between the two is critical. If we design holistically then we truly are designers however, if our role is to slap things together then I think we're more akin to a technician than a designer. To borrow a metaphor from a friend of mine, it's the difference between being an architect and a builder. One requires a vision not only of something greater than the parts but, also greater than what the parts become. The other only requires you to know how to put the parts together. I'd rather be the first one.

Powering Up While Powered Down

By Jeff Swain on June 19, 2009 8:19 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Yesterday during our emergency electrical reduction test I had the opportunity to sit down with Carla Zembal-Saul to discuss our ideas regarding the potential our blog platform has to meet several key needs including reflective learning, assessment, and accreditation.

We obviously agree that using the blog space to create some type of, for lack of a better word, presence can benefit the student, both during and after their academic career as well as the university. It's a matter of coming up with how best to do that and what this should ultimately look like. God and the devil are always in the details. But, what was really cool, sitting there in semi-darkness talking, was exploring each others unique personal stake in the project.

For Carla it focuses on the social or communal aspect of learning. Carla is interested in how ideas are generated in public spaces, such as blogs, YouTube, and Twitter. The places danah boyd refers to as the new town squares. She's exploring how these influence learning and wants to come up with better ways for us to capture these conversations. For me the focus is on the multimodal nature of these conversations and capturing their structure and meaning. The world today talks in multimedia form and we need to understand this in order to stay relevant and, more importantly, prepare our students to thrive professionally in this new manner of discourse.

One of the great things about talking with Carla, and there are many great advantages to talking with Carla, is that she focuses on the human element and what the technology can do to enhance our potential. A perspective I share. I'm excited to be working with her and seeing how each of our perspectives morph with the other to create something new.

Flux, Opportunity, and Convergence

By Jeff Swain on June 18, 2009 7:14 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
My job got a lot more interesting lately. It began in May with the announcement that Blackboard Learning acquired ANGEL. ANGEL has been our course management system since 2001 and, for the most part, has anchored our electronic learning environment. This affordance enabled us to explore many new technologies such as blogs.

Blackboard's acquisition put everything in play. Do we stay with them and eventually migrate from ANGEL to Blackboard NG a few years down the road? Do we develop something in-house? Or, do we go with another provider? A little bit of each?These next few years will be challenging and exciting as we explore all the possibilities.

Add to that I was asked to assume a large role in the blogs as portfolio initiative. I leapt at the opportunity to become part of this because I'll get to work with some talented people and because I believe that eventually we will have some sort of portfolio, or electronic presence, that serves as our online identity that we will carry with us throughout our lives., including before arriving at college. We need to position ourselves to meet the students coming in with an established online identity and help them grow it so they are ready for the world that's waiting for them.

Both of these come together with my belief that we are in an age where the definition of literacy is changing. Conversations now occur in multimodal formats, in public forums, via devices that get more powerful and smaller by the day. We need to keep this in mind as we design a portfolio program and as we determine what the course management system of the future will be. 

Summer Reading

By Jeff Swain on June 17, 2009 7:29 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
One of the joys of summer, for me, is selecting my summer reading list. In general, summer is for light reading. I search for material that fit with the weather and my temperament. This year I was fortunate enough to find most of the books on my reading list at the AAUW Book Sale in May.

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I'm almost finished with Michael Cain'e autobiography, What's It All About? A really interesting read on the actor's life because he uses the book to reflect on his experiences and not as a platform for dishing out Hollywood Secrets. A good book by a great actor.

At the moment I'm also reading through The Book of Vice by NPR's Peter Sagal. A semi-serious at some of the culturally naughty things we do and why we do them. Light, witty, and insightful, in a titalating kind of way. A fun book to read especially in a pulic place. It's worth it just to catch the double-take's of passers by.

Not pictured, because it was in my bookbag and I didn't want to reshoot, is Daniel Pink's, A Whole New Mind. Pink argues. This is the third book I'm currently reading. It's an interesting arguement for how changes in the world's economic and social landscape have given rise to right brain thinkers who are creative and empathetic.

While in the realm of psychology, or pop psychology, A friend of mine gave me a copy of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) when we were in Chicago visitng. The author, Tom Vanderbilt, whose written for Wired and Slate, did lots of research into how traffic works, why we drive the way we do, and what our driving habits say about us. My friend warned my that after reading Traffic I'd never pass through an intersection without a feeling of impending catastrophe ever again.

Psychology and comedy are really not all that different and I'm really looking forward to reading Bob Newhart's I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This! a very funny man's look back on his unexpected life.

Newhart's characterizations of the absurdity rising from the mundane should be a nice lead into Michael Palin's Hemingway's Chair about a milquetoast with the surname of Hemingway who must finally take a stand, a stand he choses to take in the manner of his hero, Ernest Hemingway.

Once I'm finished with Danile Pink, I'll pick up Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, which discusses how the spread of the internet and mobile technology has revolutionized the way the world operates. Information is power and the accessability of the masses to this information and each other is dramatically altering the political and cultural landscapes. Shirky is a great speaker and I hope one day we can land him for the TLT Symposium but for now I will enjoy his book.

There are three more on my list. Devil May Care, the new James Bond book by Sebastian Faulks. I love thrillers and espionage. They are a guilty pleasure for me. America The Book by John Stewart and Skeletons On The Zahara by Dean King. Historical adventures are another genre that will cause me to disappear into my study for the day.  

Crucial Pedagogy

By Jeff Swain on June 12, 2009 1:53 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
This morning I attended the final session of Crucial Conversations. I wrote about the seminar in an earlier post so I won't rehash that piece here. What I wanted to talk about now is the pedagogy of the seminar itself.

This is a seminar our department obviously feels is important. It is my understanding that everyone is encouraged to attend, the fee is not cheap, and attendance requires about a 14 hour commitment spread over three days. For the record I believe the seminar is worthwhile.

Having said that, seminars of this kind are usually a mile wide and an inch deep. There's a lot of content to cover and in order to do that we really do not have time to explore anything in depth. Generally this is fine. I have the book and other materials so I can explore more on my own. But, what does bother me is the lack of time we get to practice any new skills in the classroom setting.

One of the first things we learn in teaching is the importance of practice with feedback. The benefits of this are self-evident and basic. Yet, it's the first thing to get cut from the lesson plan when we're pressed for time. Why is that? Most instructors would say it's because it's more important to cover all the material, or at least as much of the material as possible. But is that true?

We never get through it all anyway so why not cover a few things well and direct us toward the best way of building on these skills? If we leave with a foundational skill set, once that we are confident we can perform because we've had the opportunity in the classroom, wouldn't we be more like to follow up and build on these skills? Instead we rely on good learning to overcome bad pedagogy.

We pile on information and expect the overwhelmed student to follow-up and make sense of it all. And what usually happens is the performance review check box gets checked, a line item gets added to the resume, and the materials go on the shelf. And the content gets forgotten.

Good Learning

By Jeff Swain on June 10, 2009 9:46 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
My old adviser used to tell us time and time again that good learning overcomes bad instruction every time. He's right, of course. A motivated learner will overcome obstacles to get what he/she needs. How far they are willing to go depends on whether this motivation is coming from within or without but, they will persist.

Unfortunately, this axiom can lead us into bad practice when designing and delivering lessons. We stick with what we're comfortable doing. Through the familiar we become complacent and design instruction as if we're designing widgets on an assembly line. In my opinion, that is the path to obsolescence. If instruction can be cranked out that way then how long before someone builds an application that will do it for us?

No, I think in order to be a good designer and good teacher we must first be good learners. We need to remain curious. Exploration will keep us nimble. After all, isn't the love of learning why we got into this business to begin with? It was for me. 

A Pleasant Surprise

By Jeff Swain on June 9, 2009 3:36 PM | 3 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Yesterday afternoon I gave a presentation at the PSU Web Conference on the topic of digital literacy. The intended audience for the conference is web designers, developers, and administrators so I was a little nervous about how my presentation would be received. Would they be interested in hearing what an instructional designer thought about the future direction higher education needs to take? I had the added disadvantage of going on right after lunch, the dead zone, where carb-loaded attendees are more interested in napping than listening to any speaker.  Curse the awesome desert table!

On top of that, I was up against Mark Greenfield, a certified rock star at this event. A fact I happily did not find out about until the last minute. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Several friends and colleagues came up to me and said they were torn between our two sessions but since they could see me any time they were ditching mine presentation to attend Mark's. I felt like I was on the wrong end of the "It's not you, it's me," breakup line.

Fortunately, I did have something going for me. I was speaking about a subject I passionately believe in, the changing nature of the world and what we in education need to do to adapt and remain valid. Or even better, a vital part of it all. 

My talk addressed two questions: What does it mean to be a 'literate'  person in the 21st Century Literacy  and what we, as educators, need to do to adjust to this new definition of literacy (see 'Change the Tool Change the Conversation').

I was pleasantly surprised my talk received the positive reaction it did. Many in the audience shared my feelings and we ended up having an excellent conversation on the changing world and how we can work together of the front and back ends to meet these new challenges.

Change the Tool Change the Conversation

By Jeff Swain on June 9, 2009 7:22 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

I am surprised how many of us educators still think of online conversations as a textual medium. The presentations I've attended at various conferences over the last year with titles such as  "Raising the Quality of Discussion..." or "Taking Communication to the Next Level," and even "Meeting Students Where They Are..." never touch on how students of today communicate. Why is that?

When I talk with colleagues we tend to agree that today's students communicate differently than we do. Yet, somehow this acknowledgment gets lost when we teach. Instead, when we set out with the objective of raising the level of discourse in our courses we immediately fall back on fall back on a familiar tool, discussion forums, and a familiar format, text.

To be sure, we follow good pedagogical practices. We build rubrics. We create interesting, relevant topics. We model expectations and ask follow-up questions aimed at generating deeper thought about they topic. Yet, all to often, the result is an unsatisfying experience for both the instructor and the students. Why? Why are we failing to engage then?

I think to understand the outcome we need examine our understanding of what communication is. And to do this we must look at the tool we choose to communicate with, discussion forums. Forums are like town hall discussions where everyone is invited to participate but they were created over a decade ago when the internet was primarily a textual medium. Today's devices are able to do so much more. Students, when they are not being students, converse in any number of ways, in many cases it's an amalgam of video, music, still images, and short text. But they are talking. And it's the way much of the world is talking even if we're not talking this way in academia.

So what do we need to do to get in on the action? We need to change the tool to change the conversation. Or, at least change the way we use the tool. Discussion forums still have a place in the discourse but their place is better served if we use them as a base and incorporate multimedia. Rather, let the students incorporate multimedia. If a student prefers to make her point through a YouTube video, and another replies with a comment, and another with an image, or song clip. Why not?

Many instructors worry about keeping track of content. Granted it's a bit more challenging depending on the applications students are using but today most of the content they create in another place on the web can be embedded right in the discussion forum. The posts are replies can still nest together with the only difference being you may be watching or listening to a student instead of reading them.

Another concern is how to evaluate these kinds of posts. We're trained to evaluate written samples to see how students frame an argument, take a position and back it up, etc. and that's what we'll still be doing. Instructors worry that they'll miss the meaning in the post but that risk is there when they write in text as well. Plus it opens up the opportunity for greater dialogue. It gives us a chance to educate the students on issues like copyright and life skills like building a professional presence.

New Training Plans

By Jeff Swain on June 7, 2009 7:05 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
I was off from work the week of Memorial Day and I used that time to alter my training program. I made my run the first thing I did when I woke up. I liked the way I felt the rest of the day so I decided to carry it into the following week when I went back to work.

Last Monday I got up at 5:00 A.M. and did two laps around town, about 6 1/4 miles. I repeated this Wednesday and Thursday. I used my lunch hour to focus on my weight training. I also ran the track in Rec Hall on Tuesday. My plan is to carry this approach, waking up at five for the purpose of running six miles, (five-4-six) through the Philadelphia Marathon in November.

Recently my job responsibilities changed and there a lot more demand on my time. By getting my run in early I can keep my preparations going and attend to my new duties. Plus, when I can work out over lunch I have the opportunity to really focus on my weight work.

I talk more about this during our podcast on Goal Setting. You can find it over on Allan's blog, Parked Thoughts. The episode is #47 and it's main topic is setting goals.

I've recently fallen off the Weight Watcher's wagon. I'm a lifetime member but have not weighed in the last three months. I need to weigh in this month to get back on the active list. I also need to lose some weight. Over these three months I put on 10 pounds. I'm at 170. I want to be at 158 for the marathon. So I'm back in training mode. 

Exciting Possibilities

By Jeff Swain on June 5, 2009 2:54 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Prior to leaving for vacation, I was asked if I'd like to have a role in our electronic portfolio initiative. I said yes and yesterday was our first meeting with returning faculty fellow, Carla Zembal-Saul (Read Carla's take).

Carla worked with us last year on the blogs as portfolio initiative where the idea was to explore the possibilities of using the PSU blogging platform as a vehicle for student e-portfolios. While I was not directly involved in the project I did find the time pick Carla's brain about the possibilities portfolio's have for teaching and learning.

In our first meeting we discussed the idea of a blog becoming a space for collaborative reflection and the possibilities of horizontal content aggregation (e.g. a service such as Disqus) to enhance discussion and reflection process by aggregating comments across blogs. Cole Camplese and Brad Kozlek have already put a lot of thought into this. I've a lot of catching up to do if I'm going to contribute to this group.

Needless to say, I'm very excited to be part of the team this year. I see great potential for a blog to become part of a social portfolio. Something in my mind that is part blog, part vitae, part showcase that you begin building academically and carry with you throught your career. Tools such as Disqus and Google Wave dramatically alter the way we think of collaboration and communication across the web bringing this ideal closer to reality.


Crucial Conversations

By Jeff Swain on June 4, 2009 8:21 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Over the course of the year everyone in our department is scheduled to attend a seminar on holding difficult conversations in a manner that enables everyone to move forward. My session took place a couple weeks back.

For me, the most beneficial piece came  the first day right before lunch when we did an assessment of our conversational style under times of stress. I wasn't surprised so much by my style but I was surprised to see where I was faltering - at the beginning and the end, the two most critical points of the conversation - because of my style. It seems that when emotions get strong I can lose focus of my goals and subsequently not come to a satisfactory resolution.

I find this to reaction to be true for life in general. When I am focused on my goals everything seems to come easier. My stress level drops. It's easy to differentiate between what's important and unimportant. I think that's because when I'm focused on my goals, I'm doing what I love to do and make a contribution to the world in some small way.
 
I do well at listening to others and creating an environment where they feel comfortable contributing to the conversation so what I need to work on are the skills that enable me to keep focused on my real goals, and not shift my focus due to an emotional reaction and make sure that I work through the conversation to a resolution, hopefully satisfactory for all parties involved.


New design launched using Movable Type

By Jeff Swain on June 3, 2009 7:18 PM | 0 Comments

My web site is sporting a new look and feel thanks to the Blogs at Penn State and the Portfolio Template Set. This template makes it possible for just about anyone to get up and running with a new web site using the Blogs at Penn State. It is literally as easy as just a few clicks. Just pick a new for your web site, select the Professional Template Set and publish. Then viola! a new web site. Thank you Blogs at Penn State!

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