Education is sometimes such a dance. There are so many ingredients that affect what we do and so many groups that influence it. A small child (a friend’s child) in Africa told his mother that he did not need to go to school any more. I laughed. My brother made the same pronouncement years earlier.

Jack Taub used to say that what we consider time out is exactly what we do in school. We sit them in a corner and don’t let them talk. Technology and well trained teaching professionals change that. But everyone is not ready for change. What is sad is that there are so many layers of bureaucracy between teachers and the latest technology and innovative practices. Not quite like slavery, but there are many overlapping levels of management.

The first several years of teaching can drive a person mad. There is never enough time, enough ways to get the job done, and it is a grueling task. Then one day, one day, you get it, and you feel like the teacher you wanted to be.

I loved learning from Project Tomorrow what I had discovered in my early years of technology use. There were two projects that led me to understand the value of technology in learning. One was the National Geographic, which offered a series of science projects for kids. So exciting.

It was science right on, a different kind of citizen science at the elementary level. It was called Kids Network. We had a PI in various areas, and we reported data to the group. We were placed in teams, some national and a couple international.

The project was about water or trash or pets or soil, but what really happened was that the learning became joyous because we were using math and science in a research way, and we plotted graphs and shared our sense of the place that we were in. But we also communicated with groups from various places in the world. Every child wanted to be a part of it. The other thing is that I was moved from the center of the room to the role of facilitator. I was the mailman — that was because we only had one printer. The folders of letters and information were so important to the children. Children who told me that they hated to write were sharing ideas and information with people from all around the US and the world. I had such joy in watching them share their information on a personal level. The learning was not incidental. We used math tools, graphs and pictographs, and we understood them well. We learned to use maps and charts. We were citizen scientists.

The original class wrote grants to make things happen. Sure they got me in trouble. For example, we had “airplane lunches,” the warmed over lunch program. and they hated it. So the kids and parents went to the school board. In this era this would have been okay, but back then I was a trouble maker. Oh well. I was a teacher traitor. But I just got over it. Michelle Obama was not there to help me so I just weathered the storm.

One of the children in that class, Nathan Lyon, was just featured as a chef on the Today Show. We, parents, teachers, and children, learned together. The school lunch did suck, and the project “Trash” let us document it.

NCLB killed projects like this.

George Stuart

The second project that gave me enlightenment was a romp through the world of the Maya. We had done the Jason project, but there was this interdisciplinary project — the Voyage of the Mimi II — that was science, anthropology, history, readings, and experiments. Frank Withrow, when he was the program manager of the U.S. Department of Education’s television series, developed it. I did not have money to buy it, but at a dinner at the National Geographic, I sat at a table with people who made it possible for me to access the program. I was sharing how we did the glyphs, the clay, the trips to the zoo, and all the things that I and the kids learned. I was teaching in a school that had very poor kids, one of them Mayan, and some very rich kids. We got along well because we bridged the economic divide with the excitement of learning. In addition I had been learning about Mexico and the Mayan culture on my own so I had “stuff.” George Stuart sent me the whole program, on a trial basis, after I shared how much I loved it. I was so lucky.

I went to Tulum, and in preparation, I studied the area through the National Geographic magazines and books. I had Earthwatch resources as well. Here’s a brief excerpt from Wikipedia:

Recounted here for the first time is the adventurous life of Frederick Catherwood, the 19th-century English artist who discovered the lost Mayan cities in the jungles of Central America and the Yucatan plateau. In 1839 Catherwood and his American companion, John Lloyd Stephens, were the first Westerners to view the immense terraces, fabulous temples, and elaborate palaces that had been inexplicably abandoned ten centuries earlier. Superbly illustrated by Catherwood, Stephens’ lively travel diaries recounting their extraordinary archaeological discoveries were published in 1841 and 1843.

I had a picture of the mounds, the remnants of the cities.

My students became cultural anthropologists, artists, researchers, historians, scientists. It was an amazing, amazing journey of leanring — and this was before broadband.

So we did not do Skype. We had the explorer himself, talking about his work on film and in person in my classroom. We had the Stuart family to answer our questions. David, since that time, has cracked the Maya Code. Even kids who thought they were not readers made glyphs and wrote in Maya code. One of the children from that class is now working at Google. He wanted to solve an even bigger problem related to the other cultures of South America. I love it that we can still talk using Facebook.

So here I am saying, well, the program is not too expensive. But there are problems. No group wanted to claim it so the gifted and talented program supervisor let me use it. However, she would not buy it so I used it for the trial period and sent it back. Who could have known that G. Stuart would be at my table. He sent the videos and resources the very next week. That man sent me my own personal set of the “Voyage of the Mimi II” and some film segments that others did not have. It was the gift of a lifetime. I had the other things I needed, pictures of Cenotes and the pictures of the explorers who found the Maya cities. One of my students was visiting Tulum and he took pictures and did a lecture after the Christmas holiday for the whole class. It was amazing to watch. The class was a fourth-fifth grade combination.

As a teacher, I never had a lot of money, but there were grants. What happened when NCLB came along was that we were not allowed to be innovative and creative. We were forced to do whatever the educational leaders of the country decided was the best path for learning. Too bad.

Michelle Fabio, in “Has the Internet Increased Plagiarism in Schools?” (Legal Zoom, May 2012), presents a useful distinction between plagiarism and copyright infringement. She also asks if plagiarism is illegal and answers yes, that is, “When the act of plagiarism is also copyright infringement.” The question of whether plagiarizing should be considered illegal is interesting. Most colleges and schools have policies on failure to credit sources, and these provide varying degrees of sanction. However, these regulations don’t have the weight of state and federal laws, and ethics rather than legality is the primary issue. An interesting topic, but perhaps for a later time.

For now, my interest is not in whether the internet increases plagiarism but, rather, how we can use technology to eliminate it. Fabio mentions online services such as The Plagiarism Checker and Turnitin. Teachers and students copy and paste suspected text in the site checker and receive reports on portions that may have been plagiarized. However, a far simpler and cost effective method is to do as Lynn Zimmerman, ETCJ associate editor, suggests: paste a suspected text string, in quotes, in a search engine such as Google. If there are hits in the works of other authors, then the text may have been plagiarized.

Teachers read literally hundreds of student papers a year, and after a few years, they develop a sixth sense for deviations from typical student prose. I’ve been teaching college composition for decades, and for me it’s like stepping into a suddenly cold spot in a shallow stream or a suddenly dark section of a forest. The change is abrupt, startling. It’s often a change in style, from the colloquial of students to the formality of professionals. It’s the use of vocabulary that sticks out like an island in an endless sea. It’s the appearance of complex sentence patterns in a field of simple and compound sentences. It’s the ray of logic in an otherwise cloudy sky. It’s a lack of transition from one thought to another, like missing planks in a dilapidated rope bridge. It’s a gut feeling based on the expected and unexpected. In short, a teacher can sense whether text has been plagiarized.

When bells go off or red flags pop up, all we need to do is select the suspected text, paste it into a search engine, add quotes around it, click on search, and wait for the results. If hits are from the works of other authors, we then select other text to determine the extent of plagiarism.

In the vast majority of cases, teachers develop a sense of a student’s abilities. Writing is a performing art. A student with poor balance won’t suddenly be able to pirouette, just as a recreational jogger won’t be able to suddenly run a sub-four-minute mile. In the online learning environment, teachers have an opportunity to observe student performances in email exchanges, discussion posts and comments, in chat forums, and in preliminary and final drafts. As a result, they develop a style image or profile of each student. Thus, a deviation from this image will raise an alarm. It simply doesn’t fit the teacher’s impression of a student’s writing style.

But this search engine approach, although simple, does take precious time from other pressing tasks. Fabio’s article makes me wonder if we can’t use word processing and web technology to more efficiently address the problem of plagiarism. I think we can, and I believe we can do it easily — with a few innovations.

I’d like to see a writing program such as MS Word include a smart plagiarism meter, or splam, as a new feature. When turned on, it would silently monitor writers as they’re composing, checking emerging text against all the text strings in the web. It would rely on search engine technology and work behind the scenes. When a string meets the built-in criteria for plagiarism, the writer is warned. The writer will also know that these passages, if not properly documented, will be automatically marked as plagiarized when the paper is loaded into the teacher’s word processor.

I’d imagine that smart plagiarism meters, or splams, will become smarter as time passes. They will eventually be able to detect plagiarized strings that have been altered by writers. These same mechanisms could also be used to facilitate writing, detect repetition and redundancy in text strings and even suggest alternatives.

With the latest technology, writing is entering a brave new world where traditional problems such as plagiarism will be significantly reduced or even eliminated and writing performance will be enhanced and facilitated.

In the USA every child is entitled to a free and appropriate education regardless of ethnic background, disabling condition, or socioeconomic level. In the last part of the 20th Century, federal legislation ensured that all disabled children had a right to a free and appropriate public education. The contributions of disabled people in America have been tremendous. From Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and Stephen Hawking to Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Helen Keller, disabled people have enriched our society. Deaf people, blind people, cerebral palsied people, and mentally challenged people have made our lives better though their accomplishments.

Many of these young people have done well in regular classrooms with average learners. Others have had to have special programs and may from time to time be in separate classes or even individual tutoring. Learning comes through our sensory input, especially our sight and hearing. However the human mind is a marvelous thing that can compensate for distortions in our sensory inputs. Think with me for a moment about how we might reach a deaf blind infant. True, there are cochlear implants that might give the child a form of hearing. There have been experiments with ocular implants, but these have not been practical to date. How then will a deaf blind infant know his or her world? They must know their world primarily through the sense of touch, taste, and smell. Unlike sight and hearing, these three are near senses.

Signs, codes, speech, and language begin in the average baby very early. The baby cries when she is wet or hungry, and her crying stimulates the mother to feed her. The baby soon stops crying when she is picked up in anticipation of being fed. Then the mother begins to make small talk as she prepares to feed the baby. This small talk begins to allow the baby to anticipate being fed, and she calms down and even begins sucking. As the caregiver talks more and more to the baby, the foundations for communications are established.

With blind babies we find them relating to the auditory speech that is in their environment. Their challenge is mostly ambulatory, that is, how to position themselves in space. In effect, how does a blind child understand up from down without visual cues. They can and do develop auditory communication skills. Cerebral palsied children develop a receptive communication skill even though they may have difficulty expressing themselves.

Technology as a prosthetic device opens new educational doors for many disabled children. A cochlear implant enables a deaf child if it works to develop almost normal speech and language. Computer aided speech gives a severely paralyzed individual, such as Stephen Hawkings, speech. Computer screens with text can change the type font and brightness that make it possible for some visually impaired learners to read.

Technology does two things for the disabled learner: (1) It can be a prosthetic device that modifies the disability, and (2) it can enrich the learning environment so that it is a more level field for all learners.

Learning on a team through a learning game the system does not know whether I am black, Hispanic, from China, deaf, a male or female, living in a New York pent house or in an isolated rural community in a desert on the New Mexico border. Technology can and must become the great equalizer, the force that gives every learner the chance to be all they can be.

When Alice in Wonderland was asked by the Queen of Hearts to do something she replied. “I can’t do that it is impossible.” The Queen of Hearts replied, “Nonsense you must think of six impossible things to do each day before breakfast and practice doing them during the day then you will learn to do the impossible.”

Technology if used wisely allows us to accomplish our impossible dreams.

Every child in the world is entitled to the best education the world can offer.

The 125,000,000 children in the world today without a teacher and without a classroom could soon have an education. The price of one day of war in the world could finance this impossible dream.

All children are entitled to learning through technology. All children deserve a teacher and a classroom. We must demand this from the world leaders. It is not an impossible dream.

As everyone knows, college has become less demanding, students don’t learn much in college, and students spend much less time studying in college than they used to. At least that’s what most everyone thinks they know — thanks to the unfortunate residue of the study Academically Adrift, whose legacy has endured long after the storm of attention and controversy which accompanied its initial publication in early 2011 has faded.

An article by New York Times columnist David Brooks about this “landmark study” is our latest reminder of what happens when important opinion makers trade in the currency of catchy memes as received truth. As Brooks asserts in his recent NYT article (based on Academically Adrift’s findings, e.g., p.69):

Colleges today are certainly less demanding. In 1961, students spent an average of 24 hours a week studying. Today’s students spend a little more than half that time…

“Certainly”?? It’s understandable that informed laymen such as Brooks equate time spent studying with level of intellectual demand, since professional educational organizations such as ASCD do the same — but that doesn’t make it any less specious.

The real problem is that the destructive memes which Academically Adrift has spawned are based on a seriously outdated perspective about what constitutes a “demanding” college education. For starters, nothing says “welcome to the 20th century” quite like equating rigor or effectiveness with time spent studying. In almost any other endeavor, spending less time to accomplish a task would be called “improved productivity.” Back when students spent an average of 24 hours a week studying, a lot of that “study time” involved sifting through card catalogs, browsing book stacks, writing papers by hand or on typewriters, and doing many other tasks which can be done much more efficiently now via other means. But instead of giving higher education any credit for this, critics both inside and outside higher education persist in treating the act of studying as if it were analogous to punching a time clock. Study time is work; socializing time is play and doesn’t count, which is not surprising since Academically Adrift reflects an almost total lack of regard for the value of student time, and the notion of optimizing student time is nowhere to be found in its memes.

Then there are the methodological problems which riddle Academically Adrift. Alexander Astin’s February 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education commentary describes these in detail, perhaps most notably that the test instruments used have low reliability and that “student-level reliability coefficients [were] not computed for this study.” Astin’s criticisms are damning enough, and there are more: Academically Adrift based its findings on a sample of first-time full-time students, which are now less than 25% of the total undergraduate population, and only those at four-year institutions, which means that community college students were excluded as well. But the Academically Adrift memes are applied to all colleges and all college students in general, including the vast majority of those who were not represented in the study’s sample.

Academically Adrift also relied on student self-reporting of time spent. I don’t know whether the comparative studies from the past (1961 et al.) used the same method, but self-reporting is not exactly the most reliable one. It becomes even more suspect when one considers what “time spent” really means in an age of social media that irretrievably blur the line between studying and socializing. A student on Facebook can be socializing one moment, studying the next, or doing both at the same time. Do you really believe that students spend the time parsing these out to the point of being capable of provding accurate estimates? Of course, students have long been mixing studying and socializing in their dorm rooms, student unions, and elsewhere on campus as well — a rich and sophisticated means of learning which has evolved well beyond the forms of “bull sessions” and has been recognized for decades. However, the Academically Adrift survey treated this form of learning as if it does not exist, as there is no category for “learning from my peers,” for example. The study’s survey instrument essentially says, if you’re not studying, you’re not learning. Countless college-educated people know better from firsthand experience, yet on this the Academically Adrift memes also remain deceptively silent.

Even worse, the survey instrument might have also said that if you’re using a computer, you’re not learning or studying. The survey included a category called “using computer for schoolwork,” but as Michelle Flinchbaugh’s February 2011 critique observed, it is not clear whether this category is included in the hours spent studying totals. My reading of the survey methodology is that it is not included, as it is not mentioned in the coding descriptions for the variable names “Hours studying alone” and “Hours studying with peers” (p.159). If so, this omission by itself invalidates the study’s findings; in any event, the study’s failure to clarify this variable illustrates how out of touch its notions of the role of studying in higher education are.

Then we get to the quality of the assessments themselves. Academically Adrift reduces improvements in critical thinking and other skills to Collegiate Learning Assessment scores and other multiple choice exams (pp.35-37), and thus fails to measure the learning that is actually going on. As for testing writing objectively, I’m with those writing experts who assert that it’s not really a very good idea. As for critical thinking skills, what the CLA really measures best is tractability; presumably, students score better when they are more willing to play along with what is otherwise a low-stakes or meaningless test for them. When I read the CLA questions cited in Academically Adrift that purport to test critical thinking (pp.21-22), I imagined thousands of test takers saying, “Who the heck cares about DynTech? I’ve got better ways to spend my time,” and then blowing off the test. Which, of course, is an exemplary application of critical thinking and time management skills that will never be reflected in the CLA scores. Certainly the numerous college students whom I’ve met while doing college visits over the past year clearly have more important things to do than perform in standardized test dog-and-pony shows.

Still, all of the above feels like shouting into a windstorm, to be honest. Millions of Americans believe college has become less demanding, students don’t learn much in college, and students spend much less time studying in college because the memes from a fatally flawed study told them so. The actual truth of the matter, or the degree to which these assertions are real issues, has become beside the point. The insidious power of the Academically Adrift memes has already coursed through the body politic, and otherwise thoughtful commentators continue passing them thoughtlessly through the system, becoming little more than meme carriers in the process.

As a result, practitioners will continue to be asked to figure out new ways to use educational technology to solve nonexistent or ill-defined problems such as how to enable students to pass standardized tests more efficiently or how to write essays that will satisfy their makers and the stakeholders who buy into them. We already see this happening in the rush to develop effective tools for computer-graded essays. One recent study reported that computer scoring is now just as accurate as human scoring — but a researcher who looked more closely at one such system (e-Rater) figured out how to game it, writing essays that earned perfect scores but which were nonsensical garbage.

We can remember that, as is always the case with such technologies, the problem is not with using them but with how they are used. But whatever we do will be shaped in part by having to respond to notions about how educational technologies should be used, based on distorted perceptions which we cannot control and can only hope to manage. The memes have already spoken.

__________
John Sener recently published a book, The Seven Futures of American Education: Improving Learning and Teaching in a Screen-Captured World (CreateSpace, 21 March 2012). A brief summary and reviews by Burks Oakley (4.11.12) and Gary R. Brown (4.14.12) are available at the Amazon site. -Editor

Thanks to the generosity of Bert Kimura of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I was able to sit in on the 2012 Technology, Colleges and Community Worldwide Online Conference (TCC).  This was not my first online conference, but it was the first I’ve encountered that incorporated a badging system so intrinsically into its programming.

Badges are by no means new to conference programming, though different environments lend themselves to different applications. For example, the first thing I do at Educause events is find the ribbon table and procure a “runs with scissors” ribbon for my badge.  In some ways, I find this ribbon more important than the one labeling me as a presenter, as it gives those I meet an insight into who I am. Active in social media? Yes. Blogger? Yes. Instructional designer? Yes. The one in any given presentation most likely to say something a little crazy? Maybe. At Educause, badges are used as conversation starters, or ways to connect with those you meet to build richer dialogues and perhaps expand your personal learning network.

TCC took a different approach, integrating the badge system to scaffold the discussions and presentations as well as to get people engaged with each other and the topics.

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My experiences with the badging were mixed. There were things I felt worked extremely well and enriched my learning. There were also times I recognized that I was less engaged with the learning than I should have been because I was completing a task in pursuit of a badge. I received/completed three badges overall:

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Every individual participating in the conference received the participant badge. The platinum badge is where I got myself in trouble. In order to obtain it I had to complete a series of quests, answering a series of questions related to conference goals and themes.

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Much like the debate surrounding conference back channels, I wonder: Would I have been more engaged with the presentations I attended if I weren’t also trying to complete these quests? Or did the quests stimulate deeper thinking about the topics at hand? While I felt I learned a great deal and that the completion of the badge quests was worthwhile, I don’t have answers for these questions at this time. I’d like to think I wasn’t distracted, but I also wonder if I might have more fully engaged my fellow conference attendees if I weren’t chasing badges. Also, interacting at the level required to obtain the badge would have meant less time to tune in and learn. It’s an interesting dilemma.

Finally, the aspect of badging I thought TCC handled extraordinarily well was the ability to nominate other attendees, based upon our interactions with them. I was honored to be nominated for, and to receive, the Innovative Thinker badge for something I posted in a chat room during a presentation surrounding the use of Facebook in the college classroom. This didn’t take away from my focus on the presentation, but it was a really neat way to find out that someone agreed with a point I’d made. It inspired me to reward others as well. From a social learning standpoint, this nomination process worked wonderfully.

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In all, the conference was a valuable experience. And, what pasty Michigan girl doesn’t love to be greeted with “Aloha!” upon firing up her web browser on a cold, rainy, 50-degree day? I chose to focus on the badges for this piece because I feel that they were well done and innovative. This is the most I have enjoyed an online conference experience in my 14-year career (and I’ve attended plenty).

I’d like to close this report with a few questions for our readers: What do you think about the badging system? To take it a step further, what are your thoughts on conference back channels? These badges were, at their core, an extension of the back channel. What do you glean from these experiences, and what do you find to be noise? How do you identify with badges, ribbons and name tags at the conference you attend, whether they are virtual or face-to-face?

The Technology, Colleges and Community Worldwide Online Conference is an annual professional development event organized by the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The online conference invites faculty, staff, administrators and students worldwide to share their expertise and engage in discussions about innovative practices in the use of educational technology.

I was invited to attend and review this year’s event on behalf of ETC Journal. TCC 2012 took place from April 17-19. Over 500 participants gathered online for three days of online presentations and discussions. The conference schedule featured 2 keynotes, 50 general presentations, 40 student presentation and 7 peer-reviewed contributions in two parallel tracks.

Though many sessions were outside my time zone, I enjoyed several inspiring talks and was particularly impressed by the conference organization’s innovative technology use. “We are pilot testing ‘badgification’ in this year’s conference,” explained conference organizer Bert Kimura.

The conference used the social learning tool BadgeStack as an organizational infrastructure to allow participants to register, provide access to the presentations and recognize attendees’ participation and activities. The social learning environment is compatible with the Mozilla Open Badge Standard. The beta release of the Open Badge Backpack was recently launched on April 10^, 2012 and TCC online encouraged participants to add their badges. Naturally, I had to try this out – and I hope to find this backpack more useful than the usual conference bag!

Fig. Screenshot Open Badge Backpack, recently released by Mozilla Foundation

For those interested in further information on the BadgeStack learning environment, I recommend the free pre-conference webinar “Badge-Based Learning and 21st Century Skills” by Jonathan Finkelstein.

The following TCC Tour D’Horizon is a personal, eclectic summary of talks I attended, either live or as recordings. For anyone interested in a first hand experience of the flavor of the conference and the type of contributions typical for TCC, the complete session recordings of TCC 2011 and the conference proceedings are open access.

SMILE from Stanford
On Tuesday, keynote-speaker Paul Kim from Stanford University started his talk with a bold confession: “I don’t really like the way students are learning in classrooms.” He then presented project SMILE, a mobile inquiry-based learning environment. Kim gave a walkthrough of different OER sites such as iTunesU, Khan Academy, MITx, Udacity and Minerva University to emphasize the growing role of open online learning material. At the same time, he stressed the fact that mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones are more and more perceived as useful learning devices rather than distractions in classrooms. Kim then posed the question: “Does learning require teaching?” He explained: “If we have questions, we want to find answers.” He advocated student-centered learning instead of teacher-driven questions. “Teachers come up with questions, while students do rote memorization and simple recalls,” Kim criticized.

The SMILE project has set out to change these roles and procedures by introducing inquiry-based learning techniques in pilot project classrooms around the world – while assessing student learning. Some lessons learned are that students are not used to coming up with their own questions. Hence, the typical questions that students develop for themselves are simple recall challenges. Also, the teachers struggle with the concept and often encourage practice test questions instead of open inquiry questions. In his outlook, Paul Kim raised awareness for mobile augmented technologies, which he predicted will have a huge impact on education.

Digital Literacy and Assessment
One feature of this year’s conference was regional speakers, who presented at 2 p.m. in their local time zones. Wednesday featured a talk by Simon Walker, head of the Educational Development Unit at the University of Greenwich (UK). In his presentation, “Becoming Digitally Literate,” Walker said there is a considerable conflict between traditional academic literacies and the fast-paced world of digital devices. Students struggle to use digital technologies in fruitful ways to enhance their learning. Another focus of Walker’s talk was student experience of assessment. He presented a Google spreadsheet document designed to allow for an easy overview of the different assessment types and student workloads throughout a program. Access to the tool can be requested through the website mapmyprogramme.com.

Open Education
Another presentation I attended on Wednesday focused on my current favorite pet topic “Open Educational Resources.” Jason Caudill’s talk was entitled “OpenCourseWare and Open Educational Resources: Forward to Credentialed Learning Outcomes?” Jason explained his position: “If you cannot connect what you are learning and the work that you are doing to employment or advancement or anything like that, it’s hard for people to justify the time. We see more and more emphasis on lifelong learning and more and more non-traditional students in our classrooms. OCW can be a great opportunity for them, if they can use it.” In his talk, Jason discussed current implementation badges and other systems of recognizing informal learning, e.g., MITx, an initiative to be fully launched in fall 2012, which will offer professional development credits.

Augmented Reality
A great feature of TCC was the student presentations that generally displayed a high level of technical skill and knowledge. Each master’s degree candidate from the University of Hawai‘i Educational Technology Program (ETEC) presented his or her graduation project. Additionally, there were sessions by students from other universities, including Kansai University in Japan.

My favorite student talk was delivered by Marisa Yamada, an ETEC graduate student, who presented the instructional design of a five-week online course on augmented reality. Her presentation made use of Aurasma, an augmented reality browser. The free Aurasma app currently works on the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

Fig. Marisa Yamada’s interactive presentation on AR in Education

Privacy
The TCC general sessions typically comprised talks that were less tailored to the traditional academic conference format but, rather, open and sometimes playful explorations of a topic or theme. A great example for this was the talk by Cynthia Calogne, professor of Emerging Media at Colorado Technical University, on “Privacy is a Myth.” Together with a group of eight students who joined her for the talk, she presented various artifacts designed by the students in Second Life as part of the “Museum of Web Privacy.” At the end of the presentation, TCC participants were invited on a digital treasure hunt in Second Life on Thursday, the last day of the conference.

Fig. The Museum of Web Privacy, a student project in Second Life

Mobile Learning Technologies
My participation on Thursday was limited by several meetings on my agenda at UNC School of Government. However, I managed to attend a great presentation by Veronica Diaz, associate director of the Educause Learning Initiative. She addressed the question of how to measure the impact of mobile learning. Veronica provided a very useful collection of mobile learning resources on Google Docs.

Fig. Educause presentation on how to measure mobile learning experiences.

Aloha and Mahalo
Given the small number of peer-reviewed contributions and the large portion of student presentations, TCC certainly is not your regular conference experience.

The best way to judge a conference is by listening to recurring participants: “This year is my fourth or fifth time at TCC. It is one of my favorite conferences because it brings together such a diverse group of people and a very international audience” (Jason Caudill).

I want to thank Bert Kimura for the invitation to attend this event and to experiment with “badgification,” a topic that will certainly be interesting for informal learning and personal learning environments in the future. Similar game-like approaches towards recognizing and rewarding activities and contributions are implemented in many online communities, for instance, the peer-to-peer learning site openstudy. How this affects user behavior is an open research question for educational technology.

(Note: This is the second of two reports on the iFacilitate 2012 online workshop. I participated as a student and opted for the certificate option to make sure that I stayed the course. I created a temporary blog for the coursework, and the excerpts below link to posts in that blog. Click here to see the first report. -js)

The five-week workshop ended last Thursday. It was an exhausting yet exhilarating experience. Greg Walker and his team put together an event that challenged and inspired all of us to address key issues in online teaching and learning with an emphasis on facilitating discussions. As expected, I emerged from the experience with far more questions than answers, and I’ll be addressing some of these in future ETCJ articles. One that remains sticky for me concerns lurking.

The common wisdom is that the ratio for active participants to lurkers is 1 to 10, i.e., only 10 percent of participants actively engage in posting and commenting in online forums. This means that the vast majority, 90 percent, lurk. Is this simply a given, a natural phenomenon that can’t be changed? If yes, then why do we expend so much energy trying to get all our students to become active participants? It seems we’re swimming against a current with no expectation of success.

If, however, lurking is a problem, then what are the implications when educators themselves are lurkers?

I don’t have the answers. My gut tells me that the 1:10 ratio is set in stone. Ninety percent will lurk, no matter what. Furthermore, this ratio may not be necessarily bad. In other words, it may not impact the quality of discussions. In fact, it may be a critical factor for successful discussions. If this is the case, then our expectations for discussions may need to change. That is, the learning context may need to include extra-discussion activities to allow lurkers to express themselves. Here, social media may be the key, providing a wide range of back channel alternatives for lurkers to become active participants.

Thus, the majority may lurk in the main forum, but in a spectrum of side forums, they may be very active. It would be interesting to speculate about what and how these added dimensions add to the notion of discussions. Obviously, when live, we can’t fully participate in more than one channel at a time, but we’ll probably discover ways to include all the various dimensions into a single landscape, and the resulting multidimensional discussion will be a thing to behold.

In any case, here are excerpts that link to posts in my iFacilitate workshop blog:

Comments on Week 3 Resources: Facilitating Discussions
Posted on March 12, 2012
In “How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: How Is a Community Different from a Network?“, Nic Laycock (eLearn Magazine, Feb. 2012) says shared goals or “mutuality” is the glue in communities: “It is the mutuality of communities that leads to success.” It is “the, perhaps unspoken, bond that will draw people together into a more close association—one that has an intention of mutual advancement to benefit all.” (Click here to read the entire post.)

Comment on Scott and Greg’s Discussion: Where Is Technology Taking Mentoring?
Posted on March 15, 2012
Scott and Greg are having an interesting discussion in “Scaling Up Mentoring” (in Scott’s blog, Online Learning, 3.14.12). Scott asks, “Can we build a digital mentor?… This is technology that can intelligently design content based on world wide information so that we can do something useful:  learn.  The question is how?” He continues, “In a sea of world-wide information, we need a focus.  We need a context for all the information out (Click here to read the entire post.)

Week 4: Comment on Herrington et al.
Posted on March 20, 2012
The ten-point definition provided by Jan Herrington, Ron Oliver, and Thomas C. Reeves in “Patterns of Engagement in Authentic Online Learning Environments” (Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2 003 [19.1], 59-71) is a useful place to begin a discussion on authentic learning activities. When viewed as a process, the whole as well as the relationship among the different elements become clearer. (Click here to read the entire post.)

Comments on Week 4 Live Meeting: Authentic Online Learning
Posted on March 22, 2012
I’m relieved that I made it to the meeting on time. I was late to the first that I attended and managed to stumble my way through, finally getting my mike to work halfway through the session. (Sorry for all the commotion, Brent.) This, my second, wasn’t problem free. When I spoke, I kept getting a delayed echo effect in my headset. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s because I chose stereo instead of mono in the setup. (Click here to read the entire post.)

Response to Week 4 Discussion Questions on Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Discussions
Posted on March 27, 2012
In his article, “Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Discussions” (International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, June 2005), Greg mentions the work that researchers at PSU have been doing with “guest facilitators.” By coincidence, in 1995, Morton Cotlar and I wrote a chapter* for a book that featured PSU’s Gerry Phillips as an electronic guest lecturer in Morton’s UH Manoa class. The lectures were delivered and the (Click here to read the entire post.)

Comments on Week 5 Readings: PBL
Posted on April 3, 2012
A useful starting point for SBL may be Elaine’s comment that “scenarios have been used successfully in many realms of education for hundreds of years” (“Scenario-Based Learning: A Commonly Accepted Way to Learn,” 2.3.11). In other words, we all use it in our personal lives as well as professionally as a means to generate critical thinking and effective decisions. It’s what we commonly refer to as a hypothetical situation, an example. When used in a (Click here to read the entire post.)

Comment on Summaries in Online Discussions
Posted on April 4, 2012
On the surface, the definition of a summary is straightforward. For me, it’s a concise reconstruction of the primary intent of a statement. From this perspective, we begin to realize its complexity. The difficulty is in the words “reconstruction” and “intent.” At best, we can only guess at a writer’s intent. That is, what s/he writes (sends, encodes) and what we read (receive, decode) isn’t always the same. As readers, we process (reconstruct) (Click here to read the entire post.)

There’s much truth in what Prof. Diane Ravitch says in “The Pattern on the Rug” (Ed Week, 3.27.12) and some exaggeration. She tars every single effort at improving our educational system with the same brush. However, education is not so simple.

The budget cuts have been devastating. Some even seem to believe that our education “deserves” this treatment. Right here at the beginning, everyone should recognize that we will not be able to survive as the preeminent nation in the world with a poor education system. Everyone should also understand that universal public education will not become 100% private in any believable scenario. Our K-12 public schools and community colleges are a bulwark of our free nation. Competition in schooling with a profit motive attached would spell disaster for schools. It’s just too difficult to measure success for a business except for gross revenues, profit, and market capitalization.

Ravitch turns the Race to the Top into white hats and black hats. I have some disagreements with this program, especially its definition of the “Top.” However, such programs can be a stimulus for our schools. As for NCLB, our problems lie not with the intentions but with the execution.

She lashes into the multiple foundations that fund education initiatives. Again, although I don’t agree with all of these, we have to try something to evaluate it. The effort by the Gates Foundation to make many small schools out of one big one had an obvious flaw before it even started, but the foundation did realize its error and withdraw its support.

She decries the effort to “perfect” a teacher evaluation system. I don’t see that such a system is possible, except at the extremes of teacher ability, but it’s still a nice idea to think about in depth. How should we evaluate the people who are responsible for our future as a nation? Should we try? Personally, I prefer Finland’s approach of evaluating teachers before hiring them and then providing all necessary support.

Prof. Ravitch threads her commentary with distaste for any effort to subdue teachers’ unions. Lots of schools don’t even have them. From what I can gather from teachers who are without unions, it’s not a good thing to be alone in this profession. At the other extreme, some very strong teacher unions have exacted contracts that only help the union and may help teachers a bit, but do little for students. I think this issue has room for compromise. Her uncompromising support just seems out of place given where we are today.

With regard to “infusing business values into education,” I completely agree. Education should not be run as a business because it isn’t one. Profit is not appropriate here. You might as well try to make the Army over into a profit-making enterprise. We must have much higher goals than profit.

Prof. Ravitch has identified a number of important issues that should be addressed and has highlighted them with examples. Then, she practically screeches her disgust for every reform effort being made. That’s no way to improve things. The sad truth is that I agree with much of what she says. I simply don’t like how she’s saying it. Perhaps she’s become so frustrated that she believes only the highest volume will produce any results.

Toward the end, she talks of online class sizes reaching 1:100, “even 1:200.” I recently spoke to an online teacher who handles 450 students. Clearly, she’s missing something here. A typical high school teacher may have five classes of 30 students. That’s 1:150 without online. Future improvements in educational software will allow teachers to cast off the dull part of their jobs and become inspiring mentors for their students, intervening as required to help students learn to think and to learn themselves for the rest of their lives. Good teachers will touch more young lives and uplift our entire country with the help of new software. These are good things. Turning them into horrible sounding numbers like 1:100 does the debate no service at all. These distortions miss the point, but Prof. Ravitch seems uninterested in this aspect of the debate.

She says, “The Common Core standards will create a national marketplace for vendors.” Her use of language makes standards seem venal. Consider what their lack does right now. It means that vendors must spend huge amounts of money customizing materials for each state, and the cost is passed on to the schools. That’s good? This high cost also makes it very difficult for new and innovative companies to enter this market. Would you prefer that the best new ideas from our U. S. companies go abroad to improve the education in other countries and not be used here?

She continues, “Public education will increasingly be handed over to businesses designed to maximize economic efficiency and produce dependable profits for investors.” Wait! That’s already happened for content providers such as textbook companies. In fact, the balkanization of our educational system has helped the few providers grow and acquire the smaller ones until there’s little freedom left for our schools.

We live in a relatively mobile society now. Large differences in education systems around the country make that mobility more difficult. Each educational jurisdiction makes and maintains its own standards at great cost. We can save money and improve education by having a central, transparent, and non-political body do this for us all. Saving money is not a demon. In engineering, the best improvement are those that simultaneously cut costs and improve the resulting artifact. I did software engineering for a long time. The holy grail there was to improve a program so that it was simultaneously better (more features, greater ease of use, etc.), smaller, and faster. Usually, you had to trade off at least one of those attributes to make one of the others better.

Our goal as a nation should be the best education possible for every single one of our children without regard to zip code or parentage or any other aspect. Neither profit nor union dogma should stand in the way of this goal. I love profit, and I like unions because they help the powerless to achieve some measure of participation in our national success. I have my own personal views on how best to pursue our national education goals. I’ve expressed a few here. I look forward to a continuing dialog about this very important, even critical, subject.

Prof. Ravitch is right to raise the alarm about “reforms.” These reforms are often about some political goal and have nothing to do with improving education. However, she should reduce the volume by a few decibels and not toss every possible change out. Doing as we have been doing is not the solution either.

[Note: This series is being brought to you by ETCJ associate editor Lynn Zimmerman. See Part I: "Technology Is a Game Changer" and Part II: “Technology Makes English the Global Language.” -Editor]

It’s an oft-discussed topic in the media that Chinese, specifically the Mandarin Chinese form that has become the official language of Mainland China, is the “language of the future.” This might sound a bit odd because Chinese is in fact one of the oldest languages in the world, but it’s pretty irrefutable that it’s also one of the fastest-rising languages in terms of global prominence. Learning to speak, read and write Chinese is becoming increasingly popular around the world, but as such an old and unusual language, Chinese presents a lot of problems for learners. Technology, however, is beginning to alleviate this on many fronts.

Chinese is a unique language and can be very difficult for Westerners who are native Romance or Germanic language speakers. Even Japanese speakers, whose native language has a lot in common with Mandarin (including some characters), can struggle mightily with learning it. That’s part of why it helps to approach Mandarin more methodically and tactically than one might a language that’s closer to their native tongue. For instance, while exposure and listening practice are still very important, it’s much more difficult to simply “pick up” Chinese than it would be to pick up Spanish for, say, a native English or French speaker. Much of this has to do with Mandarin’s tonal nature, with different pronunciations of the same syllable taking on (often wildly) different meanings. Without careful instruction and practice in differentiating the five tones, it’s tough to get going in the learning process. This hurdle is especially problematic for adult learners not only because they’ve spent decades in non-tonal or semi-tonal language environments but because they often don’t have the big blocks of time necessary to devote to language learning.

It’s crucial to carefully plan your Chinese study no matter what your learning style is. In selecting courses and materials for self-study and for group learning, make sure that learning experiences are customizable and designed to fit into your schedule. Obviously this is helpful for those learning any language, but it is especially important with Mandarin Chinese.

Technology, fortunately, has alleviated some of this difficulty, with software such as Skritter and Anki helping to teach character writing via advanced handwriting recognition and smart software. One of the biggest gifts that technology has given language learners, however, is convenience. It removes constricting elements such as fixed times and locations for learning. Some of the devices are quite simple, for example, CDs or MP3 players as well as more complex tech like RSS feeds and high speed mobile data connections. This technology has been around since the first cassette player was installed in a car, but newer innovations takes learning to a different level.

It’s now possible to get instant feedback on your language progress via your mobile phone on your lunchbreak, review flashcards in detail on a tablet while riding the bus, or even talk via Skype or phone with a native language teacher across the world as you drive to work (because Mandarin is a tonal language, repeated speaking and pronunciation practice are particularly important). The possibilities are almost limitless, with the only obstacle being one’s desire and motivation to learn. As Chinese becomes a more popular foreign language study choice around the world, it will certainly be exciting to see more technology pop up to help people learn Chinese!

Digital textbooks are all the rage these days as students and school districts clamor to get the iPad, download and fill it with $15 textbooks, and rid themselves of the heavy traditional versions once and for all. But digital textbooks are not the present – or even the future – of education. Here’s why:

1. School districts still save money by using textbooks.

Yes, digital textbooks are far cheaper than the physical variety. But various other costs – chief among them the price of an iPad and the need to periodically repurchase digital versions – drive the digital price far higher. One study found that an average school would spend $215 per student per year when following a digital textbook strategy. This compares with a far lower cost of $90 per student when only traditional textbooks are used. Although some schools with sufficient resources will surely still jump at the chance to make backpacks lighter and lessons more interactive, the significant costs associated with a digital program will prevent most districts from following this course.

2. Students make money off of textbooks.

At the high school and college levels, textbook purchases are usually the responsibility of the student and not the school. This system has caused many to speculate that digital textbooks would catch on most quickly here since students are far more likely to be tech savvy, iPad-friendly, and willing to do away with the textbooks of old. But students, just like school districts, are unlikely to find any financial benefits from digital textbook use. They expire, after all, while the traditional variety can be resold on a site like Half.com to recoup much of the initial expense. Any college kid looking to take out student loans for graduate school is going to want to pursue the most cost-efficient option.

3. Textbooks of all kinds – both traditional and otherwise – are going the way of the dodo bird.

The two above points illustrate that digital textbooks are currently not economically viable. But we can certainly expect them to drop in price over time – an expectation that has many people heralding digital textbooks as the classroom staple of the future. Such a belief ignores the fact that textbooks of all kinds are currently experiencing a slow decline.

Before the internet age, when teachers had a more difficult time acquiring classroom material, the textbook was a necessary instructional tool. These days, however, the ready availability of articles, stories, journals, videos, and assignment ideas on the web provide numerous alternative ways to teach a given topic. Teachers have consequently found themselves using textbooks less and less. We can only expect this trend to continue.

Sometime in the near future (probably in the next 10 or so years), an iPad-like device will surely become standard in school classrooms. Students will use it to work, research, and communicate with each other. But by that time, the textbook, in all likelihood, will be long dead – both in its digital and physical forms. There’s no question that the age of the digital textbook has arrived. But whether it will truly have an educational impact – in the present or in the future – still remains to be seen.