Accessibility and Literacy: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Posted on December 26, 2009 by Claude Almansi

Accessibility 4 All by Claude Almansi

Treaty for Improved Access for Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled Persons

On July 13, 2009, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) organized a discussion entitled  Meeting the Needs of the Visually Impaired Persons: What Challenges for IP? One of its focuses was the draft Treaty for Improved Access for Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled Persons, written by WBU (World Blind Union), that had been proposed by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay at the 18th session of  WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights in May [1].

A pile of books in chains about to be cut with pliers. Text: Help us cut the chains. Please support a WIPO treaty for print disabled=

From the DAISY Consortium August 2009 Newsletter

Are illiterate people “reading disabled”?

At the end of the July 13 discussion, the Ambassador of Yemen to the UN in Geneva remarked that people who could not read because they had had no opportunities to go to school should be included among “Reading Disabled Persons” and thus benefit from the same copyright restrictions in WBU‘s draft treaty, in particular, digital texts that can be read with Text-to-Speech (TTS) software.

The Ambassador of Yemen hit a crucial point.

TTS was first conceived as an important accessibility tool to grant blind people access to  texts in digital form, cheaper to produce and distribute than heavy braille versions. Moreover, people who become blind after a certain age may have difficulties learning braille. Now its usefulness is being recognized for others who cannot read print because of severe dyslexia or motor disabilities.

Indeed, why not for people who cannot read print because they could not go to school?

What does “literacy” mean?

No one compos mentis who has seen/heard blind people use TTS to access texts and do things with these texts would question the fact that they are reading. Same if TTS is used by someone paralyzed from the neck down. What about a dyslexic person who knows the phonetic value of the signs of the alphabet, but has a neurological problem dealing with their combination in words? And what about someone who does not know the phonetic value of the signs of the alphabet?

Writing literacy

Sure, blind and dyslexic people can also write notes about what they read. People paralyzed from the neck down and people who don’t know how the alphabet works can’t, unless they can use Speech-to-Text (STT) technology.

Traditional desktop STT technology is too expensive – one of the most used solutions, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, starts at $99 – for people in poor countries with a high “illiteracy” rate. Besides, it has to be trained to recognize the speakers’ voice, which might not be an obvious thing to do for someone illiterate.

Free Speech-to-Text for all, soon?

In Unhide That Hidden Text, Please, back in January 2009, I wrote about Google’s search engine for the US presidential campaign videos, complaining that the  text file powering it – produced by Google’s speech-to-text technology – was kept hidden.

However, on November 19, 2009, Google announced a new feature, Automatic captions in YouTube:

To help address this challenge, we’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.

(Automatic Captions in YouTube Demo)

So far, in the initial launch phase, only some institutions are able to test this automatic captioning feature:

UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google & YouTube channels

Accuracy?

As the video above says, the automatic captions are sometimes good, sometimes not so good – but better than nothing if you are deaf or don’t know the language. Therefore, when you switch on automatic captions in a video of one of the channels participating in the project, you get a warning:

warning that the captions are produced by automatic speech recognition

Short words are the rub

English – the language for which Google presently offers automatic captioning – has a high proportion of one-syllable words, and this proportion is particularly high when the speaker is attempting to use simple English: OK for natives, but at times baffling for foreigners.

When I started studying English literature at university, we 1st-year students had to follow a course on John Donne’s poems. The professor had magnanimously announced that if we didn’t understand something, we could interrupt him and ask. But doing so in a big lecture hall with hundreds of listeners was rather intimidating. Still, once, when I noticed that the other students around me had stopped taking notes and looked as nonplussed as I was, I summoned my courage and blurted out: “Excuse me, but what do you mean exactly by ‘metaphysical pan’?” When the laughter  subsided, the professor said he meant “pun,” not “pan,” and explained what a pun was.

Google’s STT apparently has the same problem with short words. Take the Don’t get sucked in by the rip… video in the UNSW YouTube channel:

If you switch on the automatic captions [2], there are over 10 different transcriptions – all wrong – for the 30+ occurrences of the word “rip.” The word is in the title (“Don’t get sucked in by the rip…”), it is explained in the video description (“Rip currents are the greatest hazards on our beaches.”), but STT software just attempts to recognize the audio. It can’t look around for other clues when the audio is ambiguous.

That’s what beta versions are for

Google deserves compliments for having chosen to semi-publicly beta test the software in spite of – but warning about – its glitches. Feedback both from the partners hosting the automatically captionable videos and from users should help them fine-tune the software.

A particularly precious contribution towards this fine-tuning comes from partners who also provide human-made captions, as in theOfficial MIT OpenCourseWare 1800 Event Video in the  MIT YouTube channel:

Once this short word issue is solved for English, it should then be easier to apply the knowledge gained to other languages where they are less frequent.

Moreover…

…as the above-embedded Automatic Captions in YouTube Demo video explains, now you:

can also download your time-coded caption file to modify or use somewhere else

I have done so with the Lessig at Educause: Creative Commons video, for which I had used another feature of the Google STT software: feeding it a plain transcript and letting it add the time codes to create the captions. The resulting caption .txt  file I then downloaded says:

0:00:06.009,0:00:07.359
and think about what else we could
be doing.

0:00:07.359,0:00:11.500
So, the second thing we could be doing is
thinking about how to change norms, our norms,

0:00:11.500,0:00:15.670
our practices.
And that, of course, was the objective of

0:00:15.670,0:00:21.090
a project a bunch of us launched about 7 years
ago,the Creative Commons project. Creative

etc.

Back to the literacy issue

People who are “reading disabled” because they couldn’t go to school could already access texts with TTS technology, as the UN Ambassador of Yemen pointed out at the above-mentioned WIPO discussion on Meeting the Needs of the Visually Impaired Persons: What Challenges for IP? last July.

And soon, when Google opens this automated captioning to everyone, they will be able to say what they want to write in a YouTube video – which can be directly made with any web cam, or even cell phone cam – auto-caption it, then retrieve the caption text file.

True, to get a normal text, the time codes should be deleted and the line-breaks removed. But learning to do that should be way easier than learning to fully master the use of the alphabet.

Recapitulating:

  • Text-to-Speech, a tool first conceived to grant blind people access to written content, can also be used by other reading-disabled people, including people who can’t use the alphabet convention because they were unable to go to school and, thus, labeled “illiterate.”
  • Speech-to-Text, a tool first conceived to grant deaf people access to audio content, is about to become far more widely available and far easier to use than it was recently, thus potentially enabling people who can’t use the alphabet convention because they were unable to go to school and labeled “illiterate” the possibility to write.

This means that we should reflect on the meanings of the words “literate” and “illiterate.”

Now that technologies first meant to enable people with medically recognized disabilities to use and produce texts can also do the same for those who are “reading disabled” by lack of education, industries and nations presently opposed to the Treaty for Improved Access for Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled Persons should start thinking beyond “strict copyright” and consider the new markets that this treaty would open up.

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Twit-torial

Posted on December 15, 2009 by JimS

An interesting theme arose for me in a recent e-mail conversation with my ETC Journal colleague Claude Almansi. She said Twitter is “so simple to use: all you need is to have an idea of what you want to achieve by using it, and be able to effectively communicate in 140 characters.” This got me thinking about effective communication and how hard it is to achieve. This challenge, coupled with Twitter’s ambiguous purpose, makes it easy to see why so many are confused about what Twitter can do. This column defines basic Twitter terms and address some strategies you can implement to communicate more effectively the relatively amorphous Twitter environment.

Definitions

RT – ReTweet. To share a Tweet you found interesting, use the ReTweet function. This is like crediting the original writer for sharing the information.

DM – Direct Message. This is a private message between two people. Some businesses and organizations set Twitter up to automatically DM people when they follow an account. To many Twitter natives, this is considered impersonal and irritating. Use a DM when making plans or when writing something that only affects you and one other person. This saves your common followers from a timeline cluttered with things they find irrelevant.

a red and a green bird tweeting

@ – A Twitter reply. Place @ in front of the username of the person you are writing to. For example: “@etcjournal Thank you for the article! It helped answer my questions!” In this case, @etcjournal would see your reply and know that you enjoyed one of the articles we posted. The followers you have in common with @etcjournal would also see this reply.

# – Hash tag, used for earmarking Twitter search terms. For example, if I wanted to make ETCJournal searchable on Twitter and encourage other people to do so as well, I might say something like “I just read an article on blended teaching and learning in #ETCJournal. It was very helpful!” Then, to search, one would visit http://search.twitter.com and enter #ETCJournal to see all tweets that incorporate that hash tag. Hash tags are especially useful for facilitating conference back channel conversations and identifying themes in your tweets. Note, however, that hash tags are not stored forever and when used too liberally can become clutter.

Lists – A relatively new Twitter feature, lists allow you to organize those you follow into lists based on a theme. For example, adding ed tech colleagues to an “educational_technology” list would allow you to filter out and view what they are saying, obscuring tweets from users not on that list. This tool is helpful for users who follow several hundred individuals to manage what they see and when. To create lists and see who lists you, visit http://www.twitter.com and click Listed (to see who lists you) or New List to begin creating lists of your own.

Back-channel – At conferences, there will often be a “back-channel” of users sharing ideas and thoughts on the conference in real time using Twitter or other social networking sites. This is useful for following others at the same conference who, perhaps, attend different sessions.

TweetUp – An in-person meeting of Twitter users. TweetUps are common at conferences and in larger cities, and an excellent means for building your network and meeting new people with interests or locations in common.

Basic Strategies

Be social. Find people who have similar interests as you, and interact with them. ReTweet the resources they post that you find interesting, and open a dialogue using @ replies and DMs. Often, when people are deciding whether or not to follow you back, they will look at your Twitter page and ascertain whether you interact with those in your followers list. If your account is all one-way, with you merely pushing information outward, they will choose not to reciprocate the follow or view your account as SPAM.

Be approachable. If people are making assertions that you do not agree with, try sending them a DM with your perspective, as opposed to an @ reply. Try to be open to ideas that differ from your own. This was one of the hardest hurdles for me to overcome in my Twitter use.

Attend local and conference TweetUps. Especially at conference, TweetUps can prove to be a valuable resource and a lot of fun. If you are attending a conference, ask the conference staff if they know of a scheduled TweetUp. If there isn’t one, schedule one yourself, using the conference hash tag. Conferences like Educause, SLOAN-C and Purdue’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference all schedule TweetUps as part of the proceedings to give Twitter users participating in the conference back-channel a chance to meet in person and share what they have learned.

Further Reading

10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists

7 Things You Should Know About Twitter

10 Twitter Tips for Higher Education

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Hybrid Education: Sharing the Teaching

Posted on December 11, 2009 by JimS

Judith McDanielBy Judith McDaniel
Editor, Web-based Course Design

An important part of my face-to-face classes now is to allow students a research choice of creating a blog site and posting their research on it for public comment. Since actually getting the “public” to comment on a blog, even on exciting and current topics like “Is there a gay gene?” or “Is Gardasil a good thing or not?” is nearly impossible, I require everyone in the class to post comments on three different blogs other than their own.

As I read through the posts, comments, and author responses to the  comments, I am reminded over and over again that I am not the only person in this classroom with important information. Each of these students has life experience and some have knowledge that is relevant to this subject. From the student with a gay friend to the young woman who was given the Gardasil vaccine without being told what it was, their information is pertinent and—most importantly—it is very important to and valued by their peers. They ask questions in these comments as well as respond to the information, and some of the conversations that result are far more intellectually demanding than the course syllabus.

I still allow a research option that is “just” a traditional research paper. But for the first time, I asked everyone who chooses to write an essay to post it on our discussion forum for comments. Everyone in the class also posted a comment about two research papers.

How did that work?

Every paper had at least one comment, which surprised me, but several topics were very popular. “Women’s reproductive rights” was a topic that received a lot of comments, but the one I want to mention particularly was “Obesity and You.” Although obesity would be a logical topic in a class on Science, Health, Gender and Race, it was not one that I had included in the list of possible research topics—either for the blogs or the papers. When a student approached me about this subject, I was nervous but let her take it on.

Why was I nervous? Obesity is a topic that is emotional, personal, and difficult to talk about in an objective manner—which is what I require for a research paper. The student did a good job on the paper, and when she posted it online for comments, I tracked the responses.

The first was fine: “I found your paper to be very informative on the topic of obesity. Obesity is such a sensitive subject for those that are over weight; however it is such an important topic that needs to be dealt with. I liked all of the statistics that you used throughout your paper. These helped me realize just how obese our world is becoming and how we need to do something to stop it.”

The author expressed surprise and pleasure that someone had actually read her paper (“I didn’t think anyone would”) and found it helpful. Other comments continued to be thoughtful and respectful. Readers asked for more information on connections between genetics and obesity, race and obesity—and the author responded to them all with more information and always thanked them for reading her paper.

I realized that while obesity might be a difficult topic when students are discussing it in person, online offered a medium for a more thoughtful exploration.

What did I learn? Several things. I realized that while obesity might be a difficult topic when students are discussing it in person, online offered a medium for a more thoughtful exploration. No one was casual or thoughtless or cruel in this discussion. While I can’t generalize too much from this particular experience, when I think back to all of my online discussions, I realize that I have seldom had a comment that I needed to correct or censor for tone. Wherever they learned it, my students seem to have netiquette down pat.

I also learned that I was right—students want feedback from their peers, and they are good, conscientious and careful about giving feedback to others.

And the discussions and further research that resulted also contributed to the learning experience.

This is an assignment I will use again.

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ITForum Discussion on Accessibility

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Claude Almansi

Claude AlmansiBy Claude Almansi

Editor, Accessibility Issues

The URL for the video below is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTvHIDKLFqc.The possibility to automatically caption YouTube videos in English was announced by Google on Nov. 11, 2009: a huge step forward for deaf people that benefits all users. And this is typical of most accessibility measures.

About the discussion

Photo of Roberto ElleroFrom November 29 to December 2, 2009, Roberto Ellero and I animated a discussion about Web accessibility on the Instructional Technology Forum mailing-list.

This mailing list is private (if you wish to join, apply at it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Subscribing.html), but our initial notes for the discussions are in a public wiki, accessibility4all.wikispaces.com, where the e-mail discussion has been copied to the accessibility4all.wikispaces.com/Discussion page.

The participants in the accessibility discussion were instructional design professionals, teachers and students. Therefore they were already well aware of the need for accessibility in teaching and of the existence of requirements for its enacting.

For instance they all knew that non-text objects – pictures, videos, audio files – conveying info but not accessible to all can be used, but that an alternative must be provided for people with disabilities preventing access to such objects. Nevertheless. as accessibility4all.wikispaces.com/Discussion shows, some interesting questions and issues emerged in the discussion:

General themes

Among the general, conceptual themes of the discussion:

Universal design and redundancy

Universal design, i.e., planning something that everybody can use (whether in real life or on the Web), may not be fully reachable, but it is a goal that must be kept in mind from the start of the designing process.

Redundancy – i.e., offering the same info/knowledge in different forms – is a means towards that goal. Alternative formats can be linked to in order to avoid cluttering a given web page.

Accessibility tools

The phrase “accessibility tools” is used to describe different things:

  • Assistive technology for people with disabilities: e.g., screen readers – like JAWS – for blind people.
  • Emulators of assistive technology used by designers to check how a page will be perceived by people who have to use an assistive technology: e.g., screen reader emulators – like the Fangs addon for Firefox.
  • Automated accessibility checkers used by designers, but only indicatively – just as automated spell checkers are only indicative.

Specific issues

Among the more specific and concrete issues discussed:

Language

In the context of online learning materials, if web sites must be accessible to all, including people with language disabilities/problems, won’t that entail a stylistic flattening? Or, as Robert Becker put it, in connection with the Universal Design theme:

. . . So, to make a point, I could say that assigning Chaucer’s Middle English or Shakespeare’s Elizabethan text is to erect a barrier to learners. That may be, but to do otherwise is to erect an even greater barrier to Learning.

I recall a personal experience teaching English to inner city adult students trying to earn associate degrees. I dumped the prescribed reading list full of “accessible” texts and replaced it with real literature. The memory of watching most of my students successfully engage with Jane Austin will never fade.

In Learning generally there is no greater barrier than the absence of challenge and aspiration.

Tables

Tables can be a barrier for blind people, because reading with your ears with a screen-reader means reading linearly. This issue  was first raised – in connection with the Universal Design theme, again – by Beverley Ferrell,  moderator  of the ITForum list:

If blind people read in a completely different manner ( and we may not be aware of this) and screen readers read like this:

http://wac.osu.edu/webaim/ tables2.htm then layout tables and data tables have to be designed differently.

Jim Thatcher has a fairly basic tutorial that explains it http://jimthatcher.com/ webcourse9.htm

I have not had time to read and comprehend all of this vs design for data etc such as Tufte recommends, so is it really the best way to display the data for those who are not sight disabled or must we always design two versions? and what about adding mobile issues to this? There are those who disagree with Tufte’s ideas also. Tables might not be useful, so data in graphs etc would be a real challenge for the new person designing accessible information.

Invitation

I have only highlighted some of the points raised in that discussion about accessibility on the Instructional Technology Forum mailing-list. You can find several other themes  in accessibility4all.wikispaces.com/Discussion. The mailing-list discussion is now closed, but it  can  continue either in the comments to this post or on the wiki [1], which is a more democratic platform than a blog ;-). As the video at the beginning shows, the means to enact Web accessibility are progressing fast, for the benefit of all, not only of people with disabilities.

[1] You can join the wiki at: accessibility4all.wikispaces.com/space/join.

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College Prepared to Go Online When Disaster Strikes

Posted on December 4, 2009 by JimS

Totally Online, by Jim ShimabukuroThe title of this press release caught my eye: “Ancilla College Ready to Go Completely Online as Part of Emergency Preparedness Plan”[1]. In case of emergency, the college can break the glass and press the red button that says “Campus closed. We’re now completely online.”

Ancilla is in Donaldson, Indiana, about 90 miles southeast of Chicago, and the college has hired The Learning House, Inc., to develop OPEN, which is an acronym for online preparation for emergency needs.

With OPEN in place, the college is now prepared for anything and everything that spells disaster, including flu pandemics, snow storms, floods, hurricanes, and heavy rains. Officials can now shut down the campus without worrying about disruption in learning. Like an emergency generator, all the classes shift into online mode and continue with learning as usual.

What happens if the campus shutdown lasts for months? Not a problem. From the moment OPEN, the emergency backup system, kicks in, it can function until a couple of weeks after the official end of term.

The heart of the OPEN system is Moodle, or modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment. It’s open-source and free, and it serves as a CMS, or course management system — aka as a learning software platform, LMS (learning management system), or VLE (virtual learning environment).

University of Iowa - building on campus flooded

Faculty “pre-load” what are called Moodle “course shells” with all the stuff that’s associated with learning, such as lessons, schedules, readings, lectures, assignments, activities, discussions, resources, etc.

Students, instead of reporting to their classrooms on campus, use their computers and internet connections from home or other locations to log in to the online counterparts of their classes and continue their education.

Interestingly, nowhere in this article does the writer say, directly or indirectly, that the online classes are in any way inferior to F2F (face-to-face) classes. The implication is that nothing in the way of quality is lost, and students continue to receive an effective education.

Don’t get me wrong. No one, including me, wants to see Ancilla shut down by a disaster. However, suppose it does happen in the first week of instruction and extends to a week after the last day of instruction, and suppose learning continues completely online without disruption and student achievement and satisfaction with the online classes are neither more nor less than with F2F classrooms.

Would the college pour millions into reconstructing the F2F campus and continue with business as usual, returning to the classroom-based model of learning and abandoning the online model until the next disaster strikes? Or would it pause to take stock of online learning as a viable alternative?

My guess is that it might take a disaster of this magnitude to change the way colleges view totally online classes. And once they do, they’ll never return to the mindset that classrooms are the only way to teach effectively.

BTW, this article is the first for this column, “Totally Online,” and in coming weeks and months, I’ll be publishing others that touch on the subject of completely online instruction. Other editors and writers are also debuting their columns this week in ETC: Jessica Knott, “ETC, Twitter and Me,” and John Adsit, “Meeting the Needs.”

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If Education Is to Succeed . . .

Posted on December 4, 2009 by JimS

Meeting the Needs by John Adsit

The person who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.

I got that saying off of a coffee mug years ago, but I think it more accurately sums up the most prominent thinking of American educators than any other statement I know. Sure, we know of the well-documented problems with the results of our educational system, but no matter who we are, we can identify someone else, often several someone else’s, who is really at fault. We ourselves would be doing a topnotch job if not for . . .

And a lot of that is true. There is plenty of blame to be spread around the system. The problem is that since we are surrounded by such wonderful scapegoats, it is easy to feel comfortable in our own processes, even when the people and forces we are blaming are in turn pointing their fingers at us. Even worse, a corollary to the statement from the mug might be that if we know ahead of time that we have someone to blame, we really don’t have to make any effort to succeed.

mug with inscription: The person who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on

Perhaps the most thoroughly blamed individuals are the students themselves. Oh, what wonderful educators we could be if only the students would come to the classroom properly prepared and motivated! Once again, much of that is true. Teachers in inner city schools struggle with horrific challenges, and it would be easy to develop a “What’s the use?” attitude, give up, and just go through the motions. Ironically, the opposite is also true. Many teachers in affluent communities can essentially phone in their lessons with the knowledge that the students will still somehow succeed without us, at least by our conventional standards of measure.

But studies over the last two decades have shown that individual teachers are succeeding far beyond their peers in the same troubled schools with the same students, year after year after year. Studies over the past two decades have shown that in many affluent high schools with impressive achievement results, the students actually lost ground when compared to their level of achievement when they entered the schools.

Educational leaders today call in unison for teachers to adapt their teaching to meet the educational needs of the students, but that call is not well heard in a typical classroom, especially at the secondary and post secondary levels. There the dominant mode of instruction is still generic delivery of information with the hope that the student will somehow master most of it. Before we can truly begin to meet the needs of our students, we must have the will to do so and the belief that it matters. Once we have that, we can begin to talk about the instructional strategies that can make it happen.

If online education is to realize its potential, it cannot have a goal of creating pale imitations of failed classroom practices.

Technology, especially the technology related to online education, is often touted as the great hope for meeting the needs of a diverse student population. It does indeed have that potential, but before it can do that it must understand those needs and find new and innovative ways to meet them.

One of the first commercially developed online education programs created videotapes of college professors lecturing in huge lecture halls, with their presentation slides taking up much of the screen and their talking heads streamed in the upper corner. It was a predictable failure–predictable, at least, to people who understand the needs of students.

If online education is to realize its potential, it cannot have a goal of creating pale imitations of failed classroom practices. It must instead use its resources to create a totally new approach, one that accentuates the positive of its approaches and eliminates the negative to the greatest degree possible. In this column I hope, in effect, to create a generic RFP for the kind of educational services we need in the future of online education. I may not have all the answers, but I do hope I can ask some of the right questions.

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Hybrid Education: The Interactive Class of Today and Tomorrow

Posted on December 3, 2009 by JimS

Judith McDanielBy Judith McDaniel
Editor, Web-based Course Design

I’m learning several new things in the classroom these days, thanks to the opportunity and necessity of online teaching. At the university, every class is assigned a learning management system course site. It is used for all course reserve materials, and as a teacher, I have gradually expanded to using automatically graded quizzes, posting class news and information, and now requiring online discussions. Hybrid classes are those that go beyond using the course site as a bulletin board. Hybrid classes incorporate a significant amount of online learning and interaction along with the face-to-face component of the class.

I teach face-to-face classes at a large public university and I usually have about 100 students in a class. It’s easy for a student to hide in that setting. I don’t know all the names, and even with a seating chart, it is hard for me to call on the right student with the right name! They also don’t know each other, for the most part. A shy student could go through the entire class without ever making a public comment, saying hello to a fellow student, or interacting with me beyond submitting papers and taking an exam.
a group of people discussing; picture artistically blurred
That’s changed now. Every student in my class is part of a small online discussion forum of eight or nine. Each student is required to post in response to regular prompts from me. At least twice during the semester I schedule time for these discussion groups to meet face-to-face. So students not only know that Brad posted an opinion that contradicted or supported their opinions, but they know who Brad is when they sit next to him in class or pass him on campus.

For the most part, students love this kind of interaction. Out of perhaps 1000 students I have engaged this way, I can remember only two comments from students who did not want to be required to express and support an opinion that could be identified as theirs.

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A Quick Hello

Posted on December 3, 2009 by JimS

ETC, Twitter and Me by Jessica Knott
“That sounds useless.”

“I don’t care what a bunch of teenagers are eating for lunch.”

“I just don’t have time for it.”

I’ve heard all of these arguments (and then some), and could not disagree more. Hello, my name is Jessica Knott, I work as an instructional designer at Michigan State University, and I love Twitter. Since I signed up for the Twitter service in 2007, I have watched it (and myself) evolve from “I just ate a sandwich” to “Does anyone have good resources for marketing my online course?” When used well, Twitter is so much more than a status update service, it is a wonderful communication and information gathering device.

From conference back channels to blog post sharing to chatting with friends, the greatest thing about Twitter is that it can be whatever you make it. I have had the great fortune of making friends and valuable contacts from around the world, and fervently believe that the opportunity to network is one that educators should take advantage of. We’re all doing such fascinating things, why not share them?

Twitter

That said, I understand that Twitter is not for everyone, nor will it meet the needs of all. I hope that, in my time here, I will provide information and resources you find useful to improve your Twitter experience, or help you in your implementation decisions.

I would love to hear from you. What do you want to see? What do you struggle with? What are your concerns? Let’s start the conversation! If you’d like to start it on Twitter, I can be found at http://www.twitter.com/jlknott or http://www.twitter.com/etcjournal.  Otherwise, don’t hesitate to e-mail me at jlknott@gmail.com. I look forward to “meeting” you.

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Interactive Whiteboards – Fix or Fad?

Posted on December 2, 2009 by JimS

KellerBy Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

When such an education luminary as Robert J. Marzano starts singing the praises of interactive whiteboards (IWB), people listen. And sales go up. In an ASCD article, Dr. Marzano writes about huge gains, 16 points, in student achievement when the magic boards are used in classrooms.

Are these boards really the magic fix for our classrooms that we’ve all been so desparate to find? Or, are they just another classroom fad? If the latter, then they’re certainly an expensive one that costs thousands of dollars per classroom.

We should ask two penetrating questions. Is there another less expensive way to match interactive whiteboards?  Do they, uniquely, really produce the gains Dr. Marzano reports?

Answering the first question poses no real challenge. Nearly every classroom already has a projector screen. Many have VGA (or better) projectors installed or available. These projectors that display a computer’s screen are readily available at much lower costs than the IWBs. The IWBs, after all, just display a computer screen. The computer is required in both cases.

For a modest cost, classrooms can have the display capabilities of IWBs. What about the interactive part? IWBs allow teachers to work directly with the projector screen. They can use a special stylus or their fingers to perform the same actions that a mouse does right on the board. In so doing, they must turn, at least partly, away from the students. A computer properly set up allows the same teachers to face the class while manipulating the information on the screen. It could even be a touch screen but wouldn’t have to be. The IWB has no advantage here.

interactive whiteboard at CEBIT 2007

Readily available software will allow teachers to perform the same actions of drawing colored lines that the IWB does along with all of its other capabilities. Generally speaking, the IWB holds no advantage over a much less expensive projector and screen.

What about the advantages of having the teacher standing at the board gesticulating and interacting directly with the board? I can imagine that some teachers with really good showmanship skills could glean some benefits from this technique. They themselves might enjoy preforming in this manner. However, I believe that the students will benefit very little and, in the cases of less capable performers, not at all.

The second question requires looking at what Dr. Marzano reports. He claims that three features “inherent in interactive whiteboards” improve student achievement.

  1. The learner-response device, a handheld voting device or “clicker.”
  2. Use of graphics and other visuals to represent information.
  3. Interactive whiteboard reinforcers such as visual applause for the correct answer.

Of these three “inherent” features, the second two can readily be added to the simple projector and screen system that costs a small fraction of what an IWB costs. They are inherent only in computer-based projection systems, not in expensive IWBs. They require the same amount of teacher preparation in either case and should have the same pedagogical results.

Voting devices in the hands of each student cost extra no matter which system you use. They can be purchased without buying an IWB. So far, results strongly suggest that the appropriate use of voting devices in classrooms truly does improve average student achievement. The student responses are anonymous, and the aggregated responses appear as a bar graph for all to see and discuss. Every student participates.

In my opinion, all the benefits that Dr. Marzano presents can be achieved without using an interactive whiteboard.

Dr. Marzano goes on to explain the common errors made with IWB technology and also to explain that teachers must organize their content carefully if they wish to make the best use of the technology. He makes the important point that technology will not fix anything by itself but requires training and work. Otherwise, results can be worse with the technology than without.

The popularity of IWBs has forced educators to rethink the way courses are taught, and for that, we can be appreciative of their invention. New ideas that have come from classrooms using the technology have been trumpeted across the education marketplace by the manufacturers of IWBs because of the profits that they will gain from increased sales.

In my opinion, all the benefits that Dr. Marzano presents can be achieved without using an interactive whiteboard. Less expensive alternatives exist. The boards use up valuable classroom space and have a very high cost. If you gave each of the teachers in a school the money that might be spent buying (and maintaining) an IWB, would they spend it on one, or would they find better uses for the money? More to the point, if you gave them the alternatives of an IWB system or a projector along with the difference in cost to spend on other classroom material, which would they be most likely to choose?

In these days of declining school budgets, let’s spend our education dollars wisely.

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