Harry Keller

Preface

After receiving many comments from my article, “Mars One: Exciting Adventure or Hoax?“,  and exploring many issues of any such undertaking as well as the specifics of Mars One, I have decided that the conversation has become increasingly technical and therefore less interesting to our readers. In order to make our conversation more interesting and to bring more people into the conversation, I am presenting a series of episodes in a fictional future in which the first permanent settlers will arrive on Mars. While Mars One and our discussion have generated many of the ideas, this series does not claim to have a relation to any specific Mars settlement program. It just explores the issues involved in such a venture.

For the purposes of making the exposition and discussion more real, I will name the first four humans to arrive on Mars: Aleka (Hawaiian female: aka Allie) is the flight-trained captain, Balasubramian (Indian male: Balu for short and Bob among the crew) has the crucial survival role of botanist, Chun (Chinese female: aka Chunnie) functions as the engineer, and Dawit (Ethiopian male: everyone just calls him Dave) is the mission communicator. For the purposes of having a broad gene pool, the early settlers have genetic roots that include a worldwide geographical scope of origins.

I’d like to encourage you all to participate. Each chapter will end with a problem that must be solved. I am interested in seeing ideas different from the ones I imagine and may rewrite future chapters if better answers are submitted. If you are a science teacher at any level, please consider discussing these issues in your classes. We’re nearing the end of the school year now, and this sort of discussion may work nicely with the end-of-year mentality that you encounter. A fun, open discussion can make science come alive for students. Use NASA images to liven things up. -Harry E. Keller

s the Google Mars shuttle continues its weeks-long deceleration toward its incredible destination, the crew of four busily checks the instruments on the attached Citigroup crew module where they have lived and worked for four months. They are so involved in monitoring not only their own module but also the Royal Dutch Shell supply module that they momentarily forget they’re about to become the first humans ever to set foot on another planet. The shuttle holds the two attached modules like a parent carrying twins in both arms. The configuration of shuttle and two landing modules may look awkward but creates no impediment to travel in the vacuum of space.

Four years of training guarantee that the anxious crew all know their roles in this landing precisely. The captain, Aleka (Allie), is the only flight-trained pilot on the mission, but all of them have spent countless hours in the landing simulator and can take over if necessary. Redundancy has been the watchword of the Mars mission from the very beginning.

For the landing at Amazon base, however, there could be only one crew module. Everything depends on its successful entry into the absurdly thin Mars air, about 1% of the density of that on Earth and containing 95% carbon dioxide, followed by the powered descent to the surface. Ordinary chemical rockets slow the landers as they approach the surface where the gravity is 38% of that of Earth. While the low gravity means that less fuel is required for descent, it still is strong enough to kill everyone if the landing module crashes. Every element from the heat shield and parachute to the landing engines must function perfectly for a safe landing. 

After the braking rockets have done their job, the landers will coast downward and be positioned bottom first so that the heat shield faces the thin air at a speed of nearly six kilometers per second, well beyond the speed of sound. The air slows the landers until they finally begin to drop more directly toward the surface. Careful steering during the heat-shield portion of the descent should put the landers near their landing sites. Next, the large artificial fiber parachute helps to slow the descent even in the thin Martian air. Eventually, this parachute will be recovered and used by the settlers. On Mars, the motto is “Waste not, want not.” The heat shield also drops to the surface. The landers are now falling toward the surface at a speed of about 100 meters per second, roughly the terminal velocity on Mars. The final landing uses the “grasshopper” technology pioneered by SpaceX so many years before.

Five modules have already arrived on Mars during three previous trips of the Google Mars shuttle. These modules contain crucial supplies, machinery, and living space. The Toyota greenhouse module will be crucial to long-term survival. The first two rovers, Sinopec and Gazprom, all-purpose vehicles sent in the space normally occupied by one module, already have slowly moved the modules close enough together so that the settlers can complete the linking of them into a total habitat manually. Once the last two modules have landed safely, the crew will begin final assembly into a working habitat

The module design includes means to move them on the rock-strewn Martian surface. Ultra-lightweight caterpillar treads made of composite plastic/nanofiber that extend after landing allow for slow module mobility. They have low-friction bearings to allow the low-powered rovers to move them over reasonably level surfaces. Once the modules are placed permanently, these treads will be scavenged for use internally as shelves and other purposes.

“Final pre-separation check,” snaps Allie as the about-to-be Martians go through procedures necessary to ensure a clean separation from the shuttle. The two modules will be left behind by the shuttle as it  continues on its pre-programmed trajectory back to Earth orbit for refueling, refurbishing, and acquisition of another cargo in preparation for the next encounter with Mars in two years. Allie glances out of the small thick window and sees the edge of the red planet against the black of space with its countless bright point lights of stars strewn haphazardly across its seemingly infinite reaches as though a child had thrown diamonds on a vast expanse of black velvet. A few weeks earlier, the entire crew was excited to see the small red dot of Mars expand and grow into a shiny red penny in the black, deep expanse of space  – nearly 14 billion light-years deep, far beyond human imagination. Now, it fills most of one side of their view. Earth has receded to a pale blue dot, left forever to the billions living there. A new world awaits. Will the humans or the planet triumph?

Balasubramian (Bob to his crewmates) checks that the elevation radar and computer surface recognition software are functional and ready for the descent. “A-OK,” he sings out, mimicking the astronauts of a half century ago. Extensive mapping of the Mars surface has made it possible to pinpoint landing sites with feature-recognition software operating with high-resolution cameras. Automated guidance systems will take the crew module to within 500 meters of the surface where Allie will take over for the final landing. The human touch still provides a safer landing than machines can perform. The very difficult task of guiding the craft to the right spot requires so many on-the-fly calculations to ensure minimal use of precious fuel that computers do all of that flying unless there’s an unexpected emergency.

With over a billion people watching, this is the most watched event ever on television, far more than the most recent World Cup. While many do not own television sets, they still flock to bars and public squares. The latter have been provided with large television screens in many of the larger towns across the world. Millions may be watching on their mobile telephone screens or the new voice-tablets, called VTs in an odd reversal of the abbreviation for television from nearly a century ago, which have supplanted earlier tablets and, now, laptops. This will be the first time that a human has set foot on another planet, the first anthropod on Mars ever.

Chun (aka Chunnie) is watching the fuel pressure gauges and will monitor the engines as they begin the initial braking burn right through to the final moment of landing when the engines will forever become silent. “All systems go for descent,” she intones in a clear monotone of her unaccented English resulting from growing up near San Francisco. The engines will mix liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, ignited by a spark, to produce the fiery thrust to slow the module down and then to drop it gently on the Mars surface. Large quantities of water will be dumped into the Martian atmosphere just as has happened three times previously and will happen again in two years when the second group of intrepid pioneers leave Earth for their final home on a very alien planet. Remaining fuel will find use as reserve oxygen and, under more controlled conditions, as the raw materials for making water.

Dawit sees to all telemetry and communications. He’s already ensured that the systems on the planet are ready and nominal. He must now make sure that the people back home see the entire process in the highest possible resolution. While the relative nearness of Earth and enormous advances in video recording and telemetry make possible high-resolution video, the bandwidth available for this long-distance, deep-space transmission allows for only one feed at a time. Dave, as the world knows him, must act as a sort of television show director and decide on a moment-to-moment basis which of the live video feeds to send to Earth. All are being recorded and will be sent eventually for the documentaries that will be produced. The people on Earth will be viewing the images six minutes after they happen, but no one cares about that delay caused by the finite speed of light. The signals from Mars will travel at 300 million meters per second back to Earth – but no faster or slower. That speed is unaffected by the relative velocities of Earth and Mars, a result of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

The upcoming moment of hoped-for triumph has been a decade in planning. The most difficult part of the entire project has been ensuring adequate funding for the many very expensive aspects of the undertaking. From the beginning of selecting those who would go to Mars, the entire project has been televised 24/7 on a pay channel with commercials to generate the billions of dollars necessary. Naming rights have been sold to large corporations. Thus, the Mars shuttle that has been and will continue to be seen leaving Earth orbit every two years was named the Google Mars shuttle. The producers of all of the television being transmitted around the world and translated into a dozen languages guaranteed that the Mars shuttle would not be mentioned on television without being called the “Google Mars shuttle.” Every visible man-made portion of the program has a corporate sponsor name. In this manner, a billion dollars was raised early in the program and a guarantee of hundreds of millions of dollars more every year that the program continued successfully.

Major events were not only shown on the Mars Channel but also sold to networks and cable channels. All told, over ten billion dollars had been raised before this landing. Another billion will funnel into the mission coffers over the next two years as the second manned mission prepares to go again boldly where people had never gone before – if this mission lands successfully and survives.

The landing is the easy part despite a very complex process in which a myriad of things could go wrong. Landings have been managed before. They’re not new. Soft landings are the hardest and most challenging, but also are not new. Six modules already have landed successfully, although they could withstand a stronger impact than the members of the crew could live through. The landing must not crack the Citibank crew module, with its logo prominently displayed on the outside, although the crew has donned their spacesuits in case of loss of air. A soft landing is crucial because even though a hard landing may not kill the crew outright, it would threaten survival and may injure them so much that they will be unable to perform the strenuous tasks of habitat assembly and set-up required to survive.

That’s the truly difficult part of this unique-in-history exercise – survival. So much must go right, and so much can go wrong. As the settlement grows, the margin of error will expand and allow for mistakes and failures. Right now, four people, with a large fraction of Earth’s population watching, must have everything go right. Even a small mistake will place the entire mission, along with the four pioneer settlers, in danger. Will their training and native ingenuity get them past their inevitable problems? Only time can tell, and the Earth is watching their every move.

As the two landing modules decouple from the shuttle, pulses are racing above Mars and on Earth, literally across the entire globe. The crew uses control vents to increase the separation of the modules from each other and then fires engines to slow down below orbit velocity. The shuttle adjusts its path slightly so that it can use the Mars gravity well as a slingshot to aim it on the trajectory that takes it back to Earth orbit. It begins using its ion-propulsion engine to accelerate, a process that will continue for months as it slowly uses its reaction mass to reach high speeds. It will coast for a very long time and then flip around and begin to decelerate after passing the half way point. There’s no rush, and coasting saves on the total system mass during the trip to Mars. The energy comes from its nuclear reactor, which has more than enough for the purpose. Only the liquid hydrogen supply limits its ability to continue its acceleration indefinitely. The amount has been carefully calculated to allow the shuttle to go to Mars with its cargo and then to return to Earth for refueling and refurbishing in preparation for the next flight to Mars.

All systems are nominal on the crew module as it goes through the complex steps of its landing process. Allie makes adjustments that ensure the closest possible landing to the unconnected habitat modules. Once they land, time becomes important. The crew module and Mars suits can sustain them for a few sols (Martian days), but they absolutely must connect to the other modules with all of their machinery and supplies as early as they can, and it’s a slow process in the awkward suits and with the slow-moving rovers.

On the unmanned supply module, making its way down to land nearby, a cosmic ray hits the housing of a microchip. Such hits happen rather often in space, but this time is different. Cosmic rays are mostly protons of extremely high energy moving at near light speed and can pass through matter, which looks relativistically very thin from their “viewpoint” due to Lorentz contraction, without much interaction. Occasionally, one hits the nucleus of an atom in the material it’s traversing. Matter, even solid lead, is mostly empty space with electron clouds filling it very tenuously. Incredibly tiny atomic nuclei are scattered around, in a regular pattern in crystals, like motes of dust in the air – only smaller and fewer. When a cosmic ray proton hits one of these nuclei, much of its tremendous energy is converted into mass according to Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc², a miniature version of an atomic bomb. A shower of very energetic, newly created particles rains down on whatever is below, shotgun style.

One of these shower particles hits a microscopic transistor in the microchip and flips a bit. Another hits a different transistor, the redundant partner to the first, and has the same effect, a million-to-one chance event. Bits are the language of computers and can either be a 0 or a 1. Changing a single bit can make either an insignificant difference or a major change in what the computer does. In ASCII code, used to represent written characters in some computer systems, a single bit can change an “A” to a “Q.” A different bit change could result in a “@.” In the supply lander’s computer, the change altered an instruction causing the supply lander to mistake the terrain nearby for the actual landing site. It landed perfectly safely – but over five kilometers away instead of the 100 meters planned.

Five kilometers would not be a large problem on Earth. It’s only about a half-hour’s leisurely walk. Things are different on Mars. The Curiosity Mars rover could travel at 90 m/hr using its RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) power. Improvements since then haven’t changed the speed much, especially because the rovers being used by the settlers are heavier than Curiosity was. Just imagine taking an hour to walk the length of a sports field or pitch a distance that sprinters can run in ten seconds. At a speed of around 100 m/hr (0.10 km/hr), it takes one of the two new rovers 50 hours to reach a site five kilometers distant. The Mars day is only 40 minutes longer than an Earth day meaning that the trip will require over two sols each way, but the return trip requires pushing the supply module and will take longer.

The settlers cannot survive on the Mars surface for that long, even in their Mars suits equipped with the most advanced imide aerogel insulation. Such long EVAs (extra-vehicular activity – some acronyms persist even when the literal meaning no longer applies) were never considered as part of the suit design. In fact, the batteries will only maintain temperatures for ten hours. Oxygen supply and, more importantly, carbon dioxide removal, are similarly limited. Water is also in limited supply and is not recycled in the suits, but you can go for a few days without water. Earth designers are working on a rover that will run on batteries charged from the extensive solar arrays the settlement will have along with air and water capability for long trips on the harsh Mars surface. These trips will raise more funds by allowing scientific research and save NASA and other countries’ space agencies vast sums of money. For now, the settlers much make do with what they have.

The supply module is crucial to longer survival on the planet. It contains supplies, especially food to tide the settlers over until their farm begins producing, that must be available. In one month, the situation will become dire. That module must be retrieved within four weeks. Even before retrieval, the settlers must connect the remaining modules, deploy the solar collectors, and get all air, water, and recycling facilities started. The time allowed for this purpose cannot be delayed.

The radiation shielding efforts were planned to take months and can wait even though one living unit should be shielded as soon as possible. The food growing operations can wait a day or so, although the group would love to have any fresh food as early as possible. The food stores, plant growing, and battery facilities of the missing module must be retrieved right away.

Completing the landing takes all of their attention even though they know they have a huge problem waiting when they land. The final braking runs smoothly, and they’re on Mars, the first humans ever to be there. It’s still morning on Mars, leaving plenty of time to complete post-landing procedures. Their module already has its treads down, and Gazprom is linking up to move the module into place. While being moved, the crew continues their checks and reports to Earth that all systems remain nominal. Finally, all four suit up and make final suit and module checks before depressurizing the module and stepping out. Dave will stay behind to handle communications.

With cameras on Sinopec beaming the event back to Earth, Allie steps out of the module onto the Martian surface. This moment has been planned for so long, required so much work, involved so many people. What to say to those back on their home planet? She would not echo the words of Neil Armstrong and say, “One small step for a woman; one giant leap for mankind.” That just would not do.

Once both feet were firmly planted on Martial soil, she spoke to the entire planet of Earth. “Greetings to the people of Earth on behalf of the first Martians. While we can only fervently wish for peace on Earth, we can and do declare peace with Earth now and forever.” Balu had joined her by now. Chun soon followed. Dave showed himself at the module hatch, and a picture of momentary triumph flashed  across the vacuum of space, carried by photons, for all of the news organizations on Earth. Finally, well into the 21^st century, we were on two planets. The team now splits up for work. There’s no time to lose.

Allie directs the crew to begin assembling the modules while using their comlinks to discuss ways to retrieve that missing module. A rover might or might not be capable of finding the wayward module on its own. It wasn’t designed to traverse uneven terrain for such long distances without help. The slower return trip lies even farther from its design parameters.

– end of chapter 1 –

Special note to our readers: Please consider all ideas, rational or irrational but definitely scientific, to solving the question of bringing that module back. The rovers are powered by RTGs and produce very little power, maybe 150 watts. They travel at a speed of 100 m/hr (that’s meters, not miles) when unburdened. Pushing or pulling a Mars module may approximately halve the speed.

Extra special note to science teachers: You might consider, in addition to the solution to this problem, how heavy the rovers (or how light the modules) have to be in order to push or pull the modules without slipping in the sandy, dusty Martian soil. Both the rovers and the modules have caterpillar-style treads on which they roll. As a starting point, the Curiosity rover has a mass of one metric ton. Estimate the module mass based on it being about 5 m in diameter and 3 m tall in a truncated cone shape and filled, but not solidly, with materials for use on Mars. Assume that both objects have the same style of treads and the same coefficients of friction. A really light rover might just spin its treads in the loose material, unable to move the large module mass. What is the actual speed that the combined rover and module can achieve if they can get moving?We at ETC Journal will be watching and responding as much as possible to your ideas. The next chapter awaits your pleasure.

Harry E. Keller

On May 15, 2013, I had the opportunity to attend the Stone Soup Conference, a professional development event at Meredith College in Raleigh. The day featured three talks by Dr. Curt Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University. The day was centered on major themes of Curt’s work: open learning, networking, creative instructional techniques and motivational strategies: “Quality, plagiarism, copyright and assessment are the four topics everyone wants to know about before considering online learning. I am not going to talk about any of these. I am going to talk about pedagogy,” he clarified in the beginning.

Fig.1: Curt Bonk at the Meredith Stone Soup Conference, May 15, 2013.

Curt explored the development of educational technologies over the past decades – which he depicted as a journey toward openness. Central to his credo, “Today, anyone can learn anything from anyone at any time,” is the vast amount of high-quality material available on the web. Ten years ago, the use of open learning, sharing and educational technologies was met with great resistance. Today, educators have access to sites like Merlot, Connexions, World Digital Library and Smithsonian education resources. This allows teachers to explore new roles as curators of learning: “It is our job to mine and mind high quality material – and ignore the rest.” Obviously, this does not mean that teachers merely point students toward online resources. On the contrary, Curt introduced an 80/20 rule of thumb: “Approximately 20% of students are self-directed learners; the others need our guidance.”

Throughout the day, Curt connected current technology trends with the history of education. As one of his role models, he named Charles Wedemeyer, founder of the Open University UK and author of the book “Learning at the Back Door” (1981) that predicts the impact of e-learning on education. Another example of trends prevalent today that were predicted in the 1980s is the video “Apple Knowledge Navigator” (1987).

Jokingly, Curt referred to himself as an “armchair Indiana Jones” – someone who explores the world of open learning mouse click by mouse click. In fact, Curt is an avid international keynoter and research collaborator. His experience on the international e-learning stage showed in remarks about the future of educational technologies: “If you want to see cutting edge technologies that will impact higher education tomorrow, look at elementary schools in Korea today.”

Curt Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University.

What about the present? MOOCs, the flipped classroom and audio-visual material are three themes in the current educational technology landscape that Curt highlighted during his talk and that resonated with me.

Although Curt characterized himself as technologically conservative – “I don’t jump right into things; I got my first smartphone a few weeks ago” – he is among the early-adopters of the MOOC concept. In 2012, he taught a Massive Open Online Course via Blackboard on “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success.” Another MOOC protagonist, Chuck Severance, professor at School of Information at the University of Michigan and creator of Sakai, taught a MOOC to 40.000 people on “Internet History, Technology, and Security” in 2012.  Chuck’s office hours, held all over the world, are documented on his Youtube channel.

Unsurprisingly, universities are looking at ways to transfer the concept of MOOCs to accredited degree programs: Georgia Tech has just announced a low-cost online master in computer science.

The flipped classroom – most talked about in K-12 – also impacts higher education: Students can use simple technologies and tools to create applications, blogs, podcasts, digital books and videos. Even non-tech-savvy students can create mobile experiences with applications like locacious.net or environments such as theappbuilder. To connect creative multimedia activities with scholarly work, students can, for instance, record audio book trailers of articles and textbooks or draw concept maps using free resources such as CmapTools or popplet. Web-based Timeline tools such as dipity, simile, xtimeline and timeglider enable learners to track the career of a scientist, map the development of a movement, or visualize the dissemination of an idea. Writing environments such as PiratePad or MeetingWords have a low technology threshold and offer effective collaboration tools. Activities like critiquing or creating wikibooks, blogs or multimedia glossaries improve subject knowledge and critical thinking skills.

Mobile applications and online services for recording, editing and disseminating audio and video material are exploding, opening the door for oral history and ethnography projects in the classroom. Websites like Meograph offer easy ways to create multimedia stories. Another idea is to incorporate video into the class syllabus by referencing recordings of TED talks or conference keynotes. With the web tool TubeChop teachers and students can slice material from youtube and simply repurpose videos. This allows for student-centered activities, e.g., ask students to find a concept in a video or use video as an anchor for starting classroom discussions.

Curt was a fountain of ideas for social classroom activities, creative thinking techniques, and critical reflection assignments. Here is a summary of topics that I found particularly stimulating:

• Offer variety and choice: One way to motivate students is to offer them choices, e.g., “Here are ten assignments – pick four,” said Curt. “Students loved this. Before, I just posted four assignments and they complained.” Another suggestion: Hold a library day during which students read ten articles and write a one-page summary.

• Incorporate Icebreakers: Curt advocated for deliberately framing courses: “Icebreakers are crucial for student retention in online learning.” For example, the “eight noun activity” that asks students to come up with eight self-descriptive nouns in the style “I am a…” and then reply to two-to-three peers who have something in common with them. Another suggestion: Post interests, commitments and goals to keep students in class, e.g., “online with 43things.”

• Deal with feedback: Student-centered activities often come with the downside of an overwhelming workload for the instructor. As Curt observed: “Students want feedback on everything they do. You know what happens when you give feedback on everything they do? You die.” One solution he proposed is to assign learning tandems. The “critical friend” reads and comments upon all blog posts and products. At the end of the semester, students create one meta-posting that summarizes their portfolio and is reviewed by the instructor. MOOCs are great examples for ways to handle massive participation and often spur new ideas like the online Q&A platform piazza.com: Here, students can ask, answer and rate questions and responses before the instructor attends office hours.

• Turn things upside down: Curt advocated changing the order of things to vitalize a stagnant course or classroom experience. “My class got better when I taught it in reverse order.” A service that helps with this is random.org. Another suggestion: Try reverse brainstorming: “How can we increase costs? How can we make service worse?”

• Play, imagine, and engage: Let students design “just suppose” or “what if” scenarios, using storyline tools or visualization services, e.g., xtranormal. Organize online panels, symposia or scholarly debates in which students take the role of a specific scholar. Incorporate personality role play in a discussion forum with entries from the counselor, the critique, the visionary, or the “advocatus diaboli.”

• Provide active roles: Once per semester, a student is the “cool resource provider” and has to bring a compelling resource to class. In each class session, assign a “Google jockey,” who performs background research on the fly while following the lecture. Engage students without spending too much classroom time. Ask them to bring a quote to class and present it in 99 seconds.

• Open up the classroom. Debate scholarly articles with your students in an asynchronous mode (for instance through discussion forums or reflective blogposts), then move to synchronous discussions and invite authors to your classroom session – via Google hangouts or Adobe Connect. Organize cross-classroom collaboration with other universities – maybe even internationally. You cannot change timezones, but non-native speakers can profit from tools like grammarly.com.

• Foster memorizing, reflection and debriefing. Ask students to write one-minute papers, take away messages or muddiest point papers. Ask them to note down positive, negative and interesting aspects of the class session. After a lecture, have students decide on the best three ideas they have heard, then meet with a peer and condense their six ideas to three. Creating online crosswords with eclipsecrossword or interactive flashcards with studystack are other playful ways to foster retention.

The slides of the talks at Meredith College are available online:

1. Keynote: I Am Not Content: The Future of Education Must Come Today!
2. Masterclass #1: Thinking skills. 70+ Hyper-Engaging Instructional Strategies for Any Class Size (Critical, Creative, Cooperative)
3. Masterclass #2: Where are you R2D2? Addressing Diverse Learner Needs with the Read, Reflect, Display, and Do Model

Fig.2: Takeaway messages – participants were asked to note down which tools, ideas or concepts they will definitely use (green), maybe use (yellow) and probably not use (red).

Curt, thank you for inviting me to the conference. It was an inspiring experience!

As a teacher educator, I am concerned that I am training my students how to teach yesterday’s students rather than tomorrow’s. Therefore, I was interested in seeing what T. Mills Kelly had to say, in Teaching History in the Digital Age (2013), about best practice for today’s and tomorrow’s students. As it happens, I also recently read The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, which is going to be my university’s One Book next year. Carr focuses on how the Internet has shaped how we think and view the world. Carr points out that, according to recent brain research, how we access and store information alters the physical properties of the brain. He contends that the practice of getting small amounts of information from a variety of sources may help us be more efficient information gatherers but at the cost of the ability to concentrate and reflect on what we are gathering.

Carr’s argument seems to parallel and support Kelly’s ideas in several ways. Traditionally, history teaching has relied on imparting knowledge and analysis, usually in the form of lectures, which research has shown is not the most effective approach. Perhaps partly because of this method of teaching, history is often seen by students as the acquisition of facts and not as a process of gathering and analyzing data. Also, Kelly says that the notion of perspective is often ignored, e.g., what is included, what is left out, why it is included or left out.

Kelly contends that the digital age offers historians the opportunity to help their students become historians, analysts, not just fact collectors. Not only do more students go to online sources rather than print, but today’s students are used to creating on the Internet — not just consuming. Kelly asserts that educators need to take advantage of this tendency in order to create learning opportunities that promote active engagement and not just passive acquisition through lectures and reading. He does caution that instructors must teach students that their role is not to remix or remake history. They should not give in to their desire to change primary sources so that they are “better,” a tendency that Web 2.0 savvy students may have. However, this type of engagement with history gives the instructor and students opportunities to examine the ethics of a variety of issues that can come up in projects, from plagiarism to the manipulation of information to support one’s point. 

Digital literacy is also an issue: What is good info? What are reliable sources? The Internet has made available an abundance of primary source material. However, just because a site is popular or comes up in the first few hits on Google does not mean it is a reliable source. Students must learn to work with a variety of sources and to be critical users of these sources. According to Kelly, historians have to teach students how to use information and Web 2.0 resources to prevent projects from becoming mere collections of facts. Digital literacy includes learning to use various tools to locate information in time and space, and can provide different perspectives for analyzing the material. Kelly suggests that even sources such as comments on Flickr and Wikipedia can be useful if used appropriately. He offers some simple exercises that instructors can use with students to demonstrate how Wikipedia entries evolve, how Google customizes hits for the user, and how to use reference management packages.

Kelly points out that historians not only study history but they also present what they have learned in various formats, especially essays. Instructors of history know that the process of writing, of making the abstract concrete, helps writers examine and analyze in ways they may not otherwise, using critical thinking skills. Kelly states that, according to neuroscience, there is a cognitive gain from the process of preparing information for presentation to others.

Writing in the digital environment requires different expectations from the instructor, but it is still presentation of material. In order to be an effective learning activity, it must require collaboration among students. This means that students must be taught how to work with others online, how to become a community of practice — not just a social network. Calling on the expertise of others is an important skill that students can and should learn through these projects. By using Web 2.0 to “make history” that can be seen by a larger audience rather than just writing a paper to be read by the instructor, students have the opportunity to engage with others beyond the classroom walls. Kelly asserts that a more active approach to history learning will result in students who not only know about history but understand it. He refers to Wiggins and McTighe’s “backwards design” approach, which is actually the creation of higher order learning objectives for what students will learn and be able to do.

One of Kelly’s major concerns is that students can and do use digital media. He contends that it is up to educators to help them use it in a way that enhances their educational experience, in a way that is fun, comfortable, and familiar to them while giving them the critical thinking skills to use it appropriately in historical (or other) contexts so that they become historians themselves and not just consumers of historical facts. For example, he explains that students who create their own blogs, rather than blogs that begin and end with a course, are more engaged with them. It not only gives them the chance to document their work with links, videos, etc. but also the opportunity to interact with others in the creation and maintenance of their projects. He also points out that a by-product of the use of technology is that it provides students with prompts, links, etc. that can help them develop better analytical reading strategies.

After reading these two books, I am convinced that I need to rethink how I am teaching my students if I want them to be 21st century educators. This type of open-ended teaching will turn off those students who want to be traditional teachers. However, if word gets out that teaching really is cool, up-to-date, and creative, we might attract a new breed of teachers who can and do think outside the box and are able to educate students who do more than score well on standardized tests.

The first thing you should know about Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities (Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, editors, University of Michigan Press, 2013) is that it was compiled in May 2010 — three years ago. I’m not sure what the full implications of this time gap are, but for starters, the iPad was released in April 2010, a month earlier, so it’s not mentioned in the book. The first MOOC was offered by the University of Manitoba in 2008, but they didn’t become wildly popular until 2012 so they, too, are left out.

Once past the hurdle of the three-year gap, I found the offerings interesting both as a retrospective and as a time-tested compass for change. Change is so rapid in ed tech that the concept of “past” is becoming more a blur than a time line. Thus, I found myself intrigued by this slice of time that preserves some of the more progressive thinking three years ago, including insights that are still relevant today.

I received the UM Press announcement for Hacking early yesterday morning and requested a digital review copy later that morning. After downloading it, I did a quick search for “iPad” and “MOOC” and, as expected, came up empty.

An “online and open-access version” of the book was released on 8 Sep. 2011 (Jason B. Jones, “Hacking the Academy: the Book,” Chronicle, 9.9.11), but I was unaware of it until today. Andrew Tully, in his University of Nebraska – Lincoln blog (4.18.12), provides a useful overview of the project so I won’t go into it.

I like the twist that the project has given to the word “hacking.” In “Why ‘Hacking’?”, Tad Suiter says, “Hackers are autodidacts,” and he defines hacking as “The clever gaming of complex systems to produce an unprecedented result.” But here’s the part that makes it very special even, and perhaps moreso, today: “The academy, ultimately, can only be invigorated and improved by an infusion of the hacker ethos that goes beyond the computer  science departments and infects all the disciplines.” Suiter’s point is that the hacker is us, the teachers in the disciplines, in the classrooms. Adam Turner, in “Hacker Spaces as Scholarly Spaces,” amplifies Suiter’s point. He says, “Hacking is about doing: creating, thinking, questioning, observing, learning, and teaching. The core of academic work is, at its heart, hacking.” The implications of teacher as hacker are as fresh today as they were in 2010. 

Twitter began to take off in 2009 so it’s the dominant cutting edge web technology in Hacking. However, in the years since, it’s moved into the mainstream. (See Jess Knott‘s and Melissa Venable‘s ETCJ articles on Twitter.) Still, some of the ideas are worth revisiting because they address deep issues that remain. For example, in “Uninvited Guests Twitter at Invitation-only Events,” Bethany Nowviskie writes, “The voice from Twitter cries: ‘Elitism! Hypocrisy! How can you be discussing — pick your poison: the public humanities, the future of scholarly communication, the changing nature of the disciplines — in a cloister? Who are these privileged few? And why weren’t we all invited to attend?’”

Closed or by-invitation-only F2F conferences to discuss topics that impact thousands of frontline educators is still an issue, and back channel tweeting is still a vital means to offset this down side of professional development.

In “Voices Twitter at Conferences,” Matthew G. Kirschenbaum provides a useful analogy to grasp the value of tweeting: “Most of all what I think Twitter does at a conference is create a common narrative; or better, it’s a kind of communal narrative to which all can write simply by virtue of opening an account and invoking the hashtag.” In “An Open Letter to the Forces of Change,” Jennifer Howard pits Twitter against campus email systems and, thus, provides an insight into its potential.

The trend toward open electronic academic publishing has grown, but it is still a divisive problem. Thus, the large number of pieces devoted to it are worth revisiting for eloquence if not for innovative ideas. In “Burn the Boats/Books,” David Parry applies Marc Andreesen’s “burn the boats” reference to books: “Academics should similarly ‘burn their boats,’ or in this case, ‘burn the books,’ making a definitive move to embrace new modes of scholarships enabled by web-based communication, rather than attempting to port old models into the new register.” Parry’s comment leaves me wondering if “burn the campuses” isn’t a better fit for 2013. Parry offers a list of suggestions for academic publishing in the 21st century: “Stop publishing in closed systems.” “Self-publish.” “Digital publications must interact with the web.” “Get over peer review.” “Aspire to be a curator.” “Think beyond the book.”

In “Reinventing the Academic Journal,” Jo Guldi provides some ideas that may not be as fresh today but are still very quotable:

• Web 2.0 journals that take their primary responsibility as curatorial have no need for official publication from the university-press system.
• Electronic journals will have the opportunity to expand their curatorial mandate to include different forms of publication.
• It is contrary to utility, in the world of Web 2.0, to maintain exclusive publication rights on an article.
• Like the essay, the journal peer-review process is the relic of another age.

For telling it like it is, John Unsworth, in “The Crisis of Audience [in the Humanities] and the  Open-Access Solution,” takes the prize. He says, “The simplest analysis of the ‘crisis in scholarly publishing’ is that it’s a problem of audience: nobody’s reading these books — not even colleagues in the disciplines, much less students, or the general public.” He pushes for open access: “For truly esoteric publishing, Harnad’s reasoning still holds. If the audience is very small, give it away: it’s cheaper, all the way around.”

Perhaps the most eloquent in the “Hacking Scholarship” section is Daniel J. Cohen. In “Open Access and Scholarly Values: A Conversation,” he says, “Writing is writing and good is good, no matter the venue of publication or what the crowd thinks. Scholars surely understand that on a deep level, yet many persist in valuing venue and medium over the content itself.” To underscore his point, he asks, “If you were designing a system of scholarly communication today, in the age of the web, would it look like the one we have today?” Cohen mentions blogs as a promising medium: “Disparage bloggers all you like, but they control their communication platform and the outlet for their passion, and most scholars and academic institutions don’t.”

Cohen, addressing professors, draws a hard line between closed and open publishing: “When you publish somewhere that is behind gates, or in paper only, you are resigning all that hard work to invisibility in the age of the open web.” His summary of the advantages of open and electronic publishing are worth repeating: “The dirty little secret about open-access publishing is that while you may give up a line in your CV (although not necessarily), your work can be discovered much more easily by other scholars and interested parties, can be fully indexed by search engines, and can be linked to from other websites and social media.”

MOOCs aren’t mentioned in Hacking, but in “Lectures Are Bullshit,” Jeff Jarvis describes a hypothetical “New School” approach that not only presages massive open online courses but hints at a business model that we’re only now beginning to discover: “Maybe the New School should curate the best lectures on capillary action from MIT and Stanford, or a brilliant teacher who explains it well even if not from a big-school brand; that could be anyone in YouTube U. Then the New School adds value by tutoring: explaining, answering, probing, enabling.”

Jarvis advocates portfolios and project learning. Nothing new, but still relevant: “Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory, but an incubator.”

“This is a social revolution, not a technological one,” says Michael Wesch in “From Knowledgeable  to Knowledge-able,” and he adds, “Its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.” Again, not new, but worth repeating in a time when so much emphasis is being given to technology.

Jeff McClurken’s views on teaching as empowering will never grow old. In “Digital Literacy and the Undergraduate Curriculum,” he says, “One of my desires for students is for them to be comfortable with being uncomfortable as they try new things.” By “uncomfortable,” he means “It’s good for college classes to shake students — and faculty — out of their comfort zone. Real learning happens when you’re trying to figure out the controls, not when you’re on autopilot.”

In “A Personal Cyberinfrastructure,” Gardner Campbell is calling for the kind of constructivist change that is only now beginning to break the surface. He understood, in 2010, that “the ‘progress’ that higher education achieved with massive turn-key online systems, especially with the LMS, actually moved in the opposite direction.” Campbell was ahead of his time in 2010, and he remains so in 2013. He says, “Just as the real computing revolution didn’t happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won’t happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment.”

Like Suiter and McClurken, Campbell urges a greater self-empowering role for teachers in the change equation: “To provide students the guidance they need to reach these goals, faculty and staff must be willing to lead by example — to demonstrate and discuss, as fellow learners, how they have created and connected their own personal cyberinfrastructures.”

Matt Gold, in “Learning Management Systems,” also weighs in on the negative effects of LMSs: “Learning management systems have dominated online education up until now, but must they be what we rely on in the future? Having found our way out of one box, must we immediately look for another? Can we imagine no other possibilities?” By insulating faculty from the action opportunities in the real-world web, LMSs stifle rather than nurture growth.

As a writing teacher, I couldn’t help but appreciate Mark Sample’s “What’s Wrong with Writing.” He says, in most classes, “The student essay is a twitch in a void. A compressed outpouring of energy — if we’re lucky — that means nothing to no one. My friend and occasional collaborator Randy Bass has said that nowhere but school would we ask somebody to write something that nobody will ever read.” This is as true today as it was in 2010. The web changes this closed game and makes it possible for writing to take on a social dimension. Students can share easily their essays in blogs, turning their classmates and friends into instant audiences. Sample says, “This is the primary reason I’ve integrated more and more public writing into my classes. I strive to instill in my students the sense that what they think and what they say and what they write matters — to me, to them, to their classmates, and through open-access blogs and wikis — to the world.” A teacher-only audience for writing is no match for a real-world context, and technology provides the advantage.

Perhaps the most sensational and telling article in Hacking is David Parry’s “Be Online or Be Irrelevant: Brian Croxall, the MLA, and Social Media.” It spotlights the downside of closed F2F conferences. “If you imagined asking all of the MLA attendees,” says Parry, “not just the social-media enabled ones, what papers/talks/panels were influential, my guess is that Brian’s might not make the list, or if it did, it wouldn’t top the list. That is because most of the chatter about the paper was taking place online, not in the space of the MLA.”

Croxall couldn’t afford to attend the MLA conference, where he was scheduled to present a paper about his situation. He asked a friend to make the presentation for him. He also posted his story on his website. It went viral. In “Reflections on Going Viral at the MLA,” which appears in Hacking, Croxall says, “It seems certain that practically no one at the real MLA was talking about my paper. How could they have? They hadn’t heard it. Instead, my paper and the response it generated happened at a virtual MLA.”

Christine Madsen’s “The Wrong Business for Libraries,” about academic research libraries, and Ethan Watrall’s “Notes on Organizing an Unconference” are worth reading for their clarity if not for their timeliness. There were many more excellent articles in this massive collection squeezed into 177 pages, but I simply didn’t have the time to cover them all.

Before I close, though, I need to acknowledge one of the most insightful observations in Hacking. It’s made by Tim Carmody in “The Trouble with Digital Culture.” He says, “Digital humanists’ efforts to ‘hack the academy’ most often turn out not to be about replacing an established analog set of practices and institutions with new digital tools and ideas; instead, it’s a battle within digital culture itself.” The greatest battles, from Carmody’s perspective, in the ed tech transformations to come will be fought not between analog and digital advocates but among subgroups within the digital faction with conflicting views on how technology ought to be used. I agree.

A final observation is that Hacking is surprisingly innovative, pushing the definition of “book” in a direction that bridges the gaps between text publications, virtual conferences, and blogs. As I “read” the digital version of the book, I had the sensation of participating in an online conference or a blog where the various chapters represent different presentations or posts. The feeling grew stronger when I encountered discussion-type comment sections scattered throughout the book, adding a pseudo-interactive element that is quite effective.

[UPDATE 5/18/13: See Martian Rhapsody: Chapter 1 – Landing. -Editor]

The discussion on “Mars One: Exciting Adventure or Hoax?” (4.8.13) has been wonderful, and I thank all of those who have participated. I’d like to take this entire issue to another level. Please stay tuned, watching ETC-J for a new beginning of the discussion about Mars.

“A crater near the Martian North Pole with a large lake of water ice. The lake is about 10 km across.” – Robert O’Connell, University of Virginia. NASA photo.

ETC-J is working on a serialized fictional account of the first Mars settlement so that those who are not so technically oriented can participate. We’ll have plenty of science and will address those issues we’ve talked about in the article and the discussion and many more in the context of the possible actuality of a Mars settlement. We’ll also have personalities and their reactions to crises. We’re making the assumption that it will happen within 20 years, maybe ten or so. We will use only technologies that we have or that could become available within this time frame. Exceptions will be made to this rule only if there absolutely is no other way, and we’ll still make every effort to make it scientifically sound. As a scientist, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

You’ll read about some real surprises in the episodes. We’ll be as creative as possible and will encourage all of you to write in with your ideas about how to solve the problems facing the settlers in the most recent episode. Some of your ideas will find their way into future episodes and will be acknowledged in the discussion.

If you know a science teacher, be sure to clue her/him into what’s going on. We’ll have special challenges for science classes to discuss. We invite science teachers to respond on behalf of their classes and to sign with their school name. I’m hoping that my own business, Smart Science Education Inc., will be able to fund some prizes, but I cannot make promises about that yet.

While prompted by the discussion of Mars One, any resemblance to the actual Mars One program is unintended. We will use the best ideas from anywhere, including Mars One, in our narrative, but this is NOT Mars One.

Watch for the first episode soon and be ready with your commentary on any science errors in each episode, solutions to the problems facing the settlers, and the science class challenges. I’m looking forward to a stimulating discussion. I hope you’ll join us on this adventure.

Like Jim and Stefanie, I attended TCC and SLOAN-C. Both conferences left me with big ideas and a lot to take with me into my professional practice (not to mention posts for ETC Journal, which will be rolling out in the coming weeks). But before I dive in, let me take a brief detour to direct your attention to my colleague Stefanie Panke’s write-up of her TCC experiences and state that I agree wholeheartedly with her assertion about badging. As of this year, I am sold on it. Additionally, I encourage you to read Jim’s words on session selection and his call for the flipped conference as a solution to virtual conference overload. Their reviews were amazingly well done, inspiring me to take a trip back to the drawing board for some deeper pondering on themes and my experiences.

Stefanie Panke

Last year, I found the badging experience to be somewhat superficial, but I believe now that I was approaching the whole thing somewhat incorrectly. Watching TCC 2013 unfold and seeing the interactions between attendees, I have a better understanding of the values badging provides. I saw people make personal connections based on the badges they had earned, and I saw their virtual experiences become personal ones. This is not a feeling I had at SLOAN Emerging Technologies, despite a more active Twitter back channel.

Now, as the true focus of this post, I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of the two conference experiences. I am a virtual conference veteran, but found that the close proximity of these two events provides an interesting comparative look at how little touches make attendees feel at home and connected.

Laura Pasquini

The biggest pro of both conferences was by far the people. While I felt lost most of the time in the Emerging Tech experience, with a large, hard to wield PDF of offerings and e-mails from vendors asking me to come visit their booths and thanking me for rich conversations that were never had, the Twitter back channel provided an excellent mechanism for grounding myself and allowing my brain to focus on what I was learning. Laura Pasquini (@laurapasquini) wrote an excellent blog post of her experiences at the conference. Though she attended in person, her perspectives are pertinent for those present and virtual.

Laura also sees the value in harnessing the mental and networking power of those around you to drive the vast array of ideas and innovations you encounter at a conference home. My recent article on professional cohorts offers another means for distributing this work. If you can make friends to share your cognitive load, in person or online, then perhaps the creative ideas you foster as a result of new information can gain traction. And, with help, who knows how far they’ll travel?

Other #et4online “superstars” to check out:

• @tjoosten
• @veletsianos
• @timbuckteeth

Even with this back channel, however, Emerging Tech was hard to manage from a virtual perspective. The PDF program guide was 77 pages long and difficult to search. I found myself relying more on backchannel recommendations for sessions to attend than my own interests and ability to find my way. The web interface was also rather difficult to navigate, and I felt relatively lost most of the time. I realize this may have just been me. But I encourage those attending in the future to spend more than the 45 minutes I spent familiarizing myself with the site and PDF. I was less prepared for changes and roadblocks than I thought I was. Contrast this to TCC, with an easier to navigate web presence and a more active Twitter “guide” (@tcchawaii), which made navigation and way finding a breeze. Even on day one, with technical glitches causing problems, a web page was quickly crafted and communicated, and the conference continued with little disruption.

The biggest con falls in a seemingly tiny detail. As a solely virtual attendee, I was painfully aware that I was not making the trip to Las Vegas to meet up with my colleagues. Yet, for the week leading up to the conference, my mailbox was filled daily with upwards of five to seven e-mails from vendors saying how excited they were to meet me. I was offered exclusive interviews with CIOs and chance-of-a-lifetime experiences. All I had to do was drop by their booth. My e-mail replies asking how I could participate virtually were 100% unreturned.

After the conference was no better. One vendor even sent me a detailed e-mail about the conversation we had in their booth. They raved about the insights I had regarding our shared e-learning industry and even commented on the Michigan State-based comments I made on the tradeshow floor. But I was not there. My e-mail follow-up asking if they could have confused me with someone else and requesting an interview for ETC Journal has not been returned. I choose not to reveal these vendor names until I have granted them sufficient opportunity to provide their stories.

These touches may seem small to organizers, but they made a world of difference in my feeling of connectedness. For every amazing back channel interaction that made me feel like it was as good as being there, there were two vendor e-mails that made me painfully aware that I was not. I am still cleaning up and unsubscribing. I will think twice before participating at this level again.

TCC had hitches as well, such as moderators who were occasionally absent or seemingly not as experienced as those moderating at Emerging Tech. However, this could perhaps be chalked up to the smaller conference or the occasional technical difficulties encountered by the TCC Internet provider. Experienced moderators are hard to come by, and conferences like TCC offer an excellent training ground for larger, more complex arenas.

In conclusion, virtual conferences are amazing professional development experiences, but they should be approached with tempered expectations. The content will be as incredible as it would be if you were sitting in the room; however, you may have to be aggressive in finding connections and networking events. I was naïve to allow vendors to sully my experience, and I will be more prepared in the future. I will have my sessions mapped and spend more time with the PDFs or websites in preparation. In a virtual environment, much as in a virtual course, attendees must take more control of their experience. I was not as aggressive as I usually am, and I felt it. But my heartfelt thanks go out to the TCC team as I really didn’t have to do much to feel at home in their environment. Whatever they’re doing, I sincerely hope they continue.

ET4 Online — Sloan-C’s 6th Annual International Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning, April 9-11, 2013 — was everything you could ask for in a conference. The number of presentations was mind-boggling. I was able to take in just a few. One was by Robbie K. Melton, associate vice chancellor of eLearning and a full tenured professor at Tennessee State University. She talks about “Impact and Transformation of Mobilization in Education: Emerging Smart Phones & Tablets Innovations” (10 Apr. 2013), but I have no doubt that she could probably talk about anything and get her audience to buy in. She strides the floor, mingling with her audience.

Robbie K. Melton

Her voice is vibrant, her presence is compelling. She has you hanging on every word. You know that she probably has outstanding teacher awards covering all four walls of her office. In a debate, you’re sure her opponents would probably end up cheering for her. One of the innovations she mentions allows professors to override the mobile devices that students bring to classrooms. With this gadget, professors can maintain control in their classrooms even in this BYOD era. However, you know she doesn’t need it in her classrooms. She’s that good.

Kim Coon

Another standout speaker was Kim Coon, executive vice-president for strategic partnerships at Comcourse, Inc. While Melton was hot, Coon was, well, cool. His talk was on “Making the Next Big Thing Happen, When Nobody Believes You Can: Moving from Idea, to Consensus, to Implementation” (9 Apr. 2013). He, too, mingles with the audience, carrying an extra mike for audience members to use. He’s a master at engagement. He gets the audience involved. He remembers the names and comments of those who have picked up the mike, and he integrates them into his talk, almost seamlessly, like a magician. 

He rarely relies on notes, and when he does, he attracts even more attention because you know it must be important. And he plants teasers that keep you glued to his presentation, start to finish. He promises a rubric that will lead the unwilling to accept your vision of change. And if that isn’t enough, he promises a Chinese proverb at the end. Enough said. With thousands of years of civilization, we don’t need much convincing to believe that the Chinese have somehow unlocked the mysteries of leadership, and Coon will share that bit of wisdom with us.

So, despite the fact that I’m watching Coon on video replay, I stay with him in real-time, hesitant to mouse past frames that might contain the rubric. After all, I’m just as eager as the next person to learn the secrets of persuasion to win the hearts and minds of my doubters.

When it finally arrives, I make careful note of it. Like the best rubrics, it’s captured in an acronym – CLEAR, for Communicate, Lead with Excellence, Adjust their Attitude, and Respect givers. Sprinkled with wisdom such as listen and think before responding, when people disagree it’s not always personal, and think about what you’re saying and how you’re saying it, the rubric seems to cover all the bases for “making the next big thing happen.”

Oh, and the Chinese proverb? Here it is: “If there is a light in your soul, there will be beauty in you. If there is beauty in you, there will be harmony in your home. If there is harmony in your home, there will be order in your country. If there is order in your country, there will be peace in the world.” I’m not sure if I got it all, word for word, but it’s close enough. Enlightened leadership. That’s the key. Cool.

Melton and Coon are skilled speakers, entertaining and enlightening. What more could I possibly want?

Yet I’m left wanting. Hungry not so much for more power performances but for what seems to be missing from the portion of the conference that these presentations represent, for what’s not on the menu, if that makes any sense. And this is all the more perplexing because I seem to be alone in my discontent. Everyone else seems satisfied, content if not happy with the fare.

So, what’s wrong with this picture? What’s missing?

From the standpoint of most, there’s nothing wrong, nothing’s missing. All the parts that make up a successful conference are there. Thus, the fault is mine. I’m the one who’s out of sync. I really have no business looking for something that’s not on the agenda.

So, beginning with the premise that I’m totally out of order, let me dig into my discontent. First are the small irritants. For example, re Melton’s talk, I’m not interested in gadgets that increase the professor’s control over personal communication devices that students bring to the F2F classroom. I personally prefer asynchronous online lectures to F2F ones because, simply put, they have the anytime-anywhere advantage. I don’t have to be at a specific place at a specific time to learn at someone else’s pace. Thus, for me, the issue of BYOD is moot.

Re Coon, paint me petty, but his CLEAR is a bust as far as acronyms and rubrics go. Also, it’s not at all clear how this will help me to move mountains. Re the provocative title of his talk: “the next big thing” didn’t happen, the doubters didn’t materialize, and the process for “moving from idea, to consensus, to implementation” was a no-show. It’s not that Coon didn’t have time to finish his talk – he didn’t; it’s just that the title promised far more than any one talk could ever deliver.

And what about the Chinese proverb? Turns out it’s not Chinese. It’s Indian, and it’s a corruption of the original by Sathya Sai Baba: “If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.” The ideas in both are similar, and the source is perhaps unimportant so there’s no point in making a fuss. You’re right. But these little things irritate me. But that’s just me.

As I said, these are small irritants. The big irritant for me is the assumption of how I can best learn from a conference. The linear real-time power lecture no longer works for me, that is, unless the content is truly compelling and fresh and there’s no written version available. I’m probably alone in this, but I want to learn what I want to learn in the way that’s most efficient for me. I prefer digital text because I can search for what I want, jump in where I want, linger where I want, skip what I want, copy, share, save, and quote what I want. And I’ve learned to do this quickly.

I sometimes want information quickly, succinctly, without the frills of oratorical style or audience engaging gimmicks. And this “sometimes” seems to be growing the longer I’m in the field. In other words, I want to get to the key ideas as quickly as possible to see if it’s something I can use. If yes, great! If not, I’ll move on to the next presentation that grabs my interest.

For me, it’s sorta like going to a dinner show in Waikiki. Performers twirl flaming machetes and dancers engage the audience by drawing some of them onstage to join in the hula. It’s a lot of fun for tourists, but for kama’aina, or longtime islanders, this routine is a drag. Our interest is in the few songs and dances, new or classic, that aren’t meant strictly for tourists and give the artists an opportunity to show their stuff.

I’m probably missing the whole point of education conferences. Perhaps they’re meant to be more like shows for tourists, and audiences show up expecting to be entertained. In this scenario, to be engaged means to become part of the show, to be played by the performers, to clumsily attempt a hula that only the dancers have had time to practice. The problem is that I’m no longer a tourist.

Erik Christensen

Then there was Erik N. Christensen, chair, Natural Science Department, Science and Math, South Florida State College. His presentation was “Unleash the Potential of Smartphones with Project-Based Assessments” (9 Apr. 2013). Whereas Melton was hot and Coon was cool, Christensen was dry. If the conference schedule were a google-search hit list, Melton and Coon would be stickies close to the top of the first page and Christensen would be somewhere in the middle of page 32, noticed, maybe, by the few who doggedly search beyond the first few pages.

Christensen represents a completely different population. In the Army, he’d be at the front in a foxhole, not on a canvas chair at HQ. On a team, he’d be a player in a grimy uniform, not a coach in a suit. In education, he’d be in a classroom with students, not an administrator in a posh office. His speech is slightly staccato and emanating from too high in the chest. He stands stiffly at the lectern throughout. No playing the crowd. His props are self-made, and they look it.

But he has something to say. To me, at least. He’s talking about what he, personally, is actually doing with smartphones and project-learning to facilitate his students’ learning. He’s not talking theory. He’s talking about what he’s actually doing and has done. If I were given the opportunity to chat, one-on-one, with any of the presenters I visited, Christensen would be my choice.

I’m not sure exactly where this is all leading to, and I’m not sure if I speak for anyone other than myself. If one person’s opinion counts for anything, then I’d say that perhaps what I’m feeling is a discontent that may begin to spread to others and impact instruction as well as professional development conferences­. As we gradually float away from the tethers that bind us to brick ‘n’ mortar learning environments, our preferences for learning and, by extension, teaching styles may change, too. Learning as a self-directed experience may challenge the current notion that learning i­s an other-directed process.

What are the implications for conferences such as ET4 if, in the future, I’m no longer alone in my discontent with the conference experience?

One implication is for, perhaps, a flipped conference that requires written transcripts for all presentations and allows the audience time to review and rate them prior to the actual conference.* Brief abstracts are often ineffective because they omit key ideas to attract larger audiences. With access to full texts, participants can be smarter in choosing the presentations they attend. Content would be consumed beforehand, and presentation time would then be devoted to discussing the ideas, with the audience leading the exchange and “playing” or guiding the presenter rather than the other way around. This would be similar to the flipped classroom, where the lecture is consumed out of class and class time is used to discuss problems suggested by students.

In a flipped conference, I’d have a better idea of what’s being covered by whom and have an easier time setting up a schedule. My guess is that the Meltons and Coons will continue to be popular. The big change may be with the Christensens, who have a lot to say but lack star appeal. With higher ratings and excellent reviews in the preconference phase, they could attract larger audiences and move up in the order of popularity during the actual conference.

__________
* This notion of flippping the conference experience shouldn’t be confused with “FlipCon13,” which is a conference devoted to the now popular idea of flipping classroom and homework.

Last week 1000 attendees enjoyed three days packed with information and discussion at the 18th Annual TCC Worldwide Online Conference, held from April 16-18, 2013. The acronym TCC stands for Technology, Colleges and Community. Organized by the University of Hawaii, TCC is the oldest running worldwide online conference designed for university and college practitioners. Addressees include faculty, academic support staff, counselors, student services personnel, students, and administrators.

As usual, my review is by no means an authoritative summary but comprises an eclectic collection of talks and topics I found particularly interesting as well as general observations of the conference’s atmosphere and features.

Day 1 (April 16):  Technical Hiccups, Engaging Presenters

TCC 2013 started with the GAU* for an online event: The conference site was down. Surprisingly, the impact was not as devastating as one would think. The social media team quickly rose to the occasion and posted the link to an alternative entry page on Facebook and Twitter. Social Media saved the day!

The first session I attended dealt with the question of how to approach the challenge of training faculty in using instructional technologies. Sher Downing, Executive Director for Online Academic Services (OAS) in the School of Business at Arizona State University, presented her strategies in the well-received talk “Ways to Train Faculty.” To facilitate online learning, the OAS team developed a comprehensive faculty training package that comprises innovative formats such as “hit the road” one-on-one training in faculty offices, online and interactive training and certification, faculty blogs, faculty roundtables and informal chats “on the dean’s patio.” Especially the latter seem to be an ideal space for discussing ideas, visions and problems among faculty and instructional designers.

Over the past six month, her instructional support team has seen an increase in faculty participation, a better understanding of course development and meeting student expectations online. Downing stressed the importance of identifying faculty needs through surveys, meetings and informal feedback. My favorite slide was her word cloud visualization of how instructional designers think and how their thought process in return can be overwhelming for faculty. Informal meetings allow for translating between the trend-driven world of educational technology and the realm of the traditional classroom most instructors are familiar with.

One thing I really enjoy about TCC is the integration of student presentation into the conference program. Often, these presentations are catalysts for discussions that engage new members of the educational technology community as well as seasoned instructors and researchers. A great example is the presentation by Kasey Fernandez on rubrics. In order to help distance educators use rubrics in their courses, Kasey designed an online module to teach the basics of rubrics for distance education as her master thesis project. She evaluated the module with a test group of educational technology graduate students.

In the discussion forum, Kasey motivates other teachers to use rubrics: “I have used rubrics as a teacher in the face to face setting and as a student in distance education classes. In both settings, I believe that rubrics give students the opportunity to use self assessment to optimize their assignments. As a student, I really appreciate it when my instructors use rubrics.” As participants’ comments in the discussion forum show, rubric based assessment is definitely a powerful instructional design tool that we should pay close attention to in research and practice.

Screenshots: Excerpts from forum discussion on rubrics

In “Dim the Lights: The ds106 Show,” Alan Levine presented his open course on digital storytelling. The course comprises an open assignment bank that participants populate, a daily creative challenge, and even features an internet-based radio station. To get an idea of the class atmosphere take a look at the TCC preparation session, available in Google Hangout.

A recording of Alan’s presentation is available via Adobe Connect. His “rant” about MOOCs and the current dystopian visions for online education is worth watching. Alan criticized the stagnant, non-imaginative nature of MOOCs that are offered by MITx or Coursera: “Typical format: One and a half hour of video lecture, then I get sent to a discussion forum to ‘engage’ with thousands of people. Everybody is doing the same thing, at the same time.” In contrast, ds106 is driven by the “Syndication Bus.” Alan explained: “Participants’ experiences are rooted in their own digital space.“ The learning products of ds106 are tied together through data feed aggregation, similar to the connectivist course model originally envisioned by Downes, Siemens and others.

Day 2 (April 17):  From Learning Ecologies to Library Websites to Concept Maps

An interesting opener to the second day was the keynote by Prof. Albert Sangrà from the eLearn research center at Open University of Catalonia (Spain). His talk on “Learning Ecologies for Lifelong Learning: A Roadmap for Research” outlined challenges of personal learning networks in the traditional academic environment. Again, the recording is freely accessible via Adobe Connect. Prof. Sangrà’s talk raised some interesting questions: “The potential is clear, but how much do we actually learn informally? Which success factors or strategies need to be identified?” He described a mixed-method research project that maps the learning ecologies of primary school teachers in Catalonia. At this stage, the research team has completed in-depth interviews with six teachers. Sangrà’s research roadmap envisioned studies on informal learning in different professional sectors, the need to identify best practices and strategies for individuals and institutions, the instructional design of resources and learning paths, assessment, open educational resources and teacher training.

Danilo Baylen, Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of West Georgia, discussed the use of concept maps to support student learning in online courses. He presented and compared three different online services for concept mapping: Prezi, Bubble.Us and SpicyNotes. Using data collected from mapping assignments in a university class, Danilo discussed the challenges of integrating concept mapping tools and assignments into the curriculum of an online course – it was clear that he was a big fan of mapping. “I truly believe that concept mapping is a useful tool for students to grasp the big ideas of a unit.”

Joseph Dudley is the campus librarian at Bryant & Stratton College. His talk focused on library websites, but I found it very insightful for digital resource management in general. Academic library websites have become major service points for patrons, providing access to catalogs and databases, e-journals and e-book collections, interlibrary loan services, virtual reference resources and even real time assistance from librarians via chat. Joseph stated that “As a mode of communication, academic library websites are both product and process.”  I asked him to elaborate and he explained his idea as follows: “The user sees the library portal as a stable product. On the librarian side, however, the site is a process that requires regular maintenance, regardless whether the content is updated or not. On a day-to-day basis, if no new content is publicized, the users will not be aware of the process side.”

My colleague, Rob Moore, presented the webinars and e-learning modules the instructional design team at UNC School of Government develops with Adobe Connect. He ended his presentation with an open discussion. The participants raised interesting aspects for organizing online learning, for example: “It’s amazing what we can do with software such as this, but some of us do not have staff to help with developing courses.  I guess the major impediment to me is simply the time it takes to produce content – and juggling that with other responsibilities” (Ed Birdyshaw).

Day 3 (April 18): All About MOOCs

My last day at TCC was all about MOOCs. Terry Anderson, researcher in the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Centre at Athabasca University, focused his talk on the challenges of social interactions and peer-to-peer learning in massive open online courses, open educational resources, and open scholarship. In his presentation, Anderson started out by explaining classical learning theories, i.e., behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism and used this foil to discuss different types of open learning. I particularly found his visualization of “social constructivist freedoms” enlightening to understand choices in open course design. The talk is available online.

What have we learned about MOOCs and their potential to support learning? Veronica Diaz, associate director at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, tried to answer this question by reviewing evaluation data and examples of how MOOCs are being utilized. I was impressed by the evaluation data Diaz pulled from the 2012 Stanford MOOC. It shows the diversity of backgrounds in MOOC participants.

Refreshingly, Diaz’s talk was not a one-way lecture but comprised interactive polls. In the beginning, for instance, she asked participants if they are in the process of creating or adopting MOOCs at their institution. As an idea for future TCCs, it would be great to carry on these conversations in the discussion forum.  A collection of resources used in the presentation can be accessed via Google Docs. Also, the recording of Diaz’ talk is available.

Thoughts About Badges

In our reviews of TCC 2012**, Jessica Knott and I had both praise and critical comments for the idea of badges as an incentive to foster conference activity.

This year, I am sold – not necessarily to the concept of badges but to the idea of letting conference attendees explore new tools and technologies. Here is why: Several postings by Paula Iaeger convinced me that including this innovative feature had impact beyond the conference itself. Paula said: “The next week I return to Texas to begin my work on a co-op of highly skilled educators to build a series of badges for our classes and for the general public. To say the TCC Conference was important to me is an understatement.“

Conclusion

Despite technical difficulties on the first day of the conference, TCC 2013 was a great event that brought together students, researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds. Due to the time difference, I was only able to attend a few online sessions live, which made me appreciate the lively well-designed online forum even more. TCC offers opportunities to meet and learn, in synchronous and asynchronous forms.

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* Größter Anzunehmender Unfall (worst possible accident, German)

** See Stefanie’s Mahalo TCC 2012: I Have a New Badge Backpack! and Jess’s The Quest for Badging: My Experiences at TCC 2012.

Cohort I

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Educause Midwest Regional Conference in Chicago, Illinois. While there, I attended a session by Brian Paige, IT Director of Calvin College, Bo Wandschneider, CIO (Chief Information Officer) of Queen’s University, and Melissa Woo, Vice Provost for Information Services and CIO at the University of Oregon entitled “Creating Peer Mentoring Networks for Leadership Development.” Calling themselves a “cohort,” these three, and others they have picked up since their initial meeting, have become a support group of sorts for each other as they navigate careers in leadership positions in the higher education field.

Bo Wandschneider, Melissa Woo, Pete Hoffswell, and Dan Ewart.

I asked them some questions about their experience, and, in true cohort fashion, they collaborated together in a Google document to answer. The following responses are the collaborative effort of Paige, Wandschneider, and Woo, as well as Pete Hoffswell of Davenport University and Dan Ewart of the University of Idaho.

What drew you to the people you ultimately grouped with?

What drew us to each other were our commonalities. We’re all in a more-or-less similar stage in our career progressions. As such, we face similar challenges and had a lot in common that we wanted to discuss. Currently four of the five of us are CIOs (and the rest of us are encouraging the fifth!). Interestingly only one of us was a CIO at the time of joining the group. Three of us became CIOs during the time we’ve been in the group. An additional motivating factor for one of the group’s members is that he’d seen presentations given by some of the members of the group and was excited about the chance to explore their ideas further. However, what’s probably most important and the one thing that really drew the people in the group to each other was the willingness to share and trust. 

What benefits have you drawn from the efforts you’ve put into the cohort?

The members agree that there are a variety of benefits to being a member of the cohort. In general, the group acts much like a personal “Cabinet.” We can bounce ideas off of the others as a sort of “sanity check,” and get quick, unbiased reviews of materials being prepared for presentations to campus. The group is a “safe” place to speak freely about the challenges on one’s campus with others who are not at the same institution. Perhaps one of the most important benefits is that the group provides a sense of camaraderie and reassurance that one isn’t facing challenges alone. When in a leadership role, it’s often far too easy to feel isolated and having others to consult who are facing similar challenges helps in reducing the sense of isolation.

It is interesting that when you asked this question you wanted us to compare the benefits to the effort we have put into it.  I think we all agree that the benefits far outweigh the efforts.  It is easy to get a significant return on our meetings, and at the end of the day that is likely why it is working so well and why we keep coming back. There are not many professional development activities that we have done that generate this kind of return.

How have your shared experiences shaped your professional development? You can play with this one a bit, trying to get at how you feel you’ve changed as a result of the experience.

Overall, each of us feels we’re better leaders for being part of the group. Some of the thoughts shared by members of the group on how it’s helped our professional development include:

• “The others force me to think critically about my approach to some of the challenges I face.”
• “Issues are raised by the others that I haven’t yet considered.”
• “Sharing and collaborating with the others makes me a better, more thoughtful leader.”
• “I am more confident that things for which I’m striving – increased transparency, strategic planning, etc. – are common among other progressive leaders.”
• “I’m more willing to put crazy ideas out, as this group helps to refine and improve those ideas rather than dismiss them.”
• “This group allows me to be a more progressive and thoughtful leader by pushing me to think about new ideas, and it encourages me to think outside of the box”

Why do you think others should consider this – or do you? I know in your talk you said that there were some very key things that you thought each cohort should have. What are they?

Others should definitely consider forming cohorts of peers groups facing similar issues and challenges, as it’s important to have cohorts with shared experiences. It comes down to a desire to grow and develop within and beyond your current role. Anyone can form such a group — it’s just a matter of finding others and looking for some key attributes that such cohorts should have, such as:

• Mutual trust
• Honesty
• Synergy
• Shared experience
• Transparency
• Commitment
• Willingness to learn and develop

Remember to keep the group small, as it helps to deliver on such things as mutual trust.  Larger peer groups can also be valuable but they also deliver something different.

Cohort II

Rachel Bicicchi, Tom Evans, Lorin Sheppard, and the author, Jess Knott.

This session was the talk of the conference. And, as a direct result of this session, another cohort was born:

• Rachel Bicicchi – Assistant Professor, Educational Technology Coordinator and Research/Instruction Librarian at Milliken University
• Tom Evans – Instructional Designer at Ohio State University
• Lorin Sheppard – Director of Instructional Design for the Manchester University College of Pharmacy
• Jess Knott – Instructional Designer at Michigan State University

I asked Rachel a bit about what interested her in the cohort idea as someone who was willing to jump on board.

What drew you to the cohort talk when you saw it in the program?

Honestly, it didn’t really jump out at me in the program, but there weren’t any other talks that were appealing to me during that particular time slot during the conference, either.  I saw that Melissa Woo was presenting, and I’ve communicated with her on Twitter and read about her in a recent Educause Review, so I decided to give her session a shot.

What made you think “Oh! This is something I should do?”

Well, it was pretty obvious immediately that the cohort was really successful for the presenting group, since four of the five are now CIOs, and I particularly liked the idea of being able to communicate with other people who do what I do. This is particularly important to me since I’m a “one woman band” at my institution as far as educational technology goes.  I see people at conferences, but it will be nice to have a group to meet with (even virtually) more often.

How did you identify cohort-mates?

Well, I was sitting next to you [Jess] at the table, and I had introduced myself earlier in the day (during dessert, I think?)  It all happened because I happened to be sitting next to your colleague Tatum and you happened to walk up, and I realized we’d been talking on twitter already.

What thoughts would you like to share about cohorts, their potential, what’s scary about them; all of it?

I’m excited about it right now.  I suppose it can be kind of scary to share information with people you don’t know well at the start, but I assume we’ll spend part of the first meeting getting to know each other.

Interested in cohorts? Interested in creating your own? Planning to? Let us know in the comments!

Google Voice (Voice) is a telephony management service offered by Google. Like their other services, Voice is free-of-charge, with the exception of international calls. If you already have a personal Google account, and, with 425 million active Gmail users worldwide, chances are that you do, getting started with Voice can be very easy.

One of the initial steps in the setup process is selecting a phone number. Voice can assign users a phone number from most U.S. area codes (Alaska and Hawaiʻi users cannot currently obtain local phone numbers through Voice). Alternatively, users can choose their own phone number in many area codes. Let’s say you own a pet grooming company. You could check the availability of the number “DOG-WASH” or “364-9274.”

Voice is officially available to users in the U.S. only, but I have successfully used it in Japan with no problems, making and receiving free calls and text messages to and from the U.S. via Voice’s web interface. With the help of a WiFi connection and another free Android App, GrooveIP, I was also able to use my phone to send and receive calls and text messages, just as I would at home, without being charged for data or minutes. U.S.-based international students may want to set up Voice accounts for their families back home.  

Sprint mobile customers have the option to integrate their existing phone number into Voice. As a Sprint customer, I’ve taken advantage of this partnership. I’ve had my mobile phone number for over a decade and would rather not go through the hassle of sending everyone a new phone number. I have read in online forums that some Sprint customers with 808 mobile numbers have been able to integrate it into Voice, although I cannot verify this.

So you’ve successfully set up Voice for your pet grooming company. Unfortunately, your business partner called in sick and you cannot hear the phone at the front desk while you’re giving that Golden Retriever a mohawk in the spa room. What to do? Tell Voice to ring your cell phone in addition to your work landline during business hours. With Voice, users can have multiple phones ring whenever a call is placed to their Voice number. Users can choose which phone(s) will ring depending on the time of day and on the caller.

As a spoiled member of a generation of people who grew up with computers, I have a short attention span, and I’ve always considered retrieving voicemail messages to be a chore. It used to be that I had to dial a phone number and navigate a maze-like menu in order to listen to a voicemail message that most likely sounded like this: “Hey, it’s Nate. Give me a call.” Smartphones made voicemail retrieval much easier, with only a couple of screen presses required. Voice takes this a step further, automatically transcribing voicemails and sending a text message of the transcription to the user’s phone along with the audio voicemail message.

Additionally, voicemail messages and their transcriptions are saved in an email in the user’s Gmail account. Users then have a permanent, searchable record of every voicemail that they receive. For me, this is easily the most useful feature. Now I don’t have to go through the trouble of holding the phone to my face to listen to a voicemail; I can simply read it on the screen. I’ve found the transcriptions to be accurate on the whole, and they’re almost always accurate enough to understand the point of the message. Users have the option to “donate” voicemails for analysis to help improve the accuracy of future transcriptions.

Not sure if you want to take that call from your mom right now? Find out what she’s calling about before you answer. With Voice’s call screening feature, users can listen to voicemail messages as they are being recorded. They can then decide to take the call or to let the caller finish the message. Users also have the ability to block callers.

Another feature of Voice is the ability to create different voicemail greetings for different callers. If your pet grooming company phone number is the same as your personal cell phone number, you could create one voicemail greeting for callers in your “friends” contact group, e.g., “Hey, you’ve called Mike. Leave a message.” You could direct all other calls to your company voicemail greeting, e.g., “Aloha. You’ve reached Kama’aina Pet Grooming Service….” My classmate Ian Kim found this feature particularly useful: “I really like that you can set up different voice mail messages for different callers. I use a more professional sounding one on my Voice number.”

Other features not discussed in this article include conference calling, cheap international calls, and phone number porting. If you’re interested in those, click here. As I’ve mentioned, Voice is not without its flaws. The biggest drawback for me as a Hawai’i resident is that I cannot get a local phone number. Likewise, my classmate, Kristie-Lee Oshiro, finds the lack of local numbers to be disconcerting: “[G]oogle voice sounds great.… However, I have a[n] 808 number as do most of us in Hawai’i.”

Another feature that I would welcome is the ability to send and receive faxes. I have been using Voice for about two months now, and despite its shortcomings, I highly recommend it. The convenience of the voicemail transcription feature alone was worth the trouble of the setup process. Many Google Play Store reviewers agree, having given Voice an average rating of 4.2/5 stars out of over 100,000 reviews. The editors of CNet also concur, concluding in their review, “Overall, I think Google Voice is a fantastic service that’s worth signing up for.” PC Magazine rated Voice for Android, “Excellent,” noting that “Google Voice for Android is the best way to use Google Voice on a cell phone.”

Install Voice today on your Android device to further integrate your communications world.