Uncategorized | Educational Technology and Change Journal

Social Networking: Weaving the Web of Informal Ties

Posted on February 1, 2010 by JimS

By Stefanie Panke
Editor, Social Software in Education

The term networking describes the behavioral patterns that people display to gain, maintain and make use of social relationships in a professional context. The relevance of the concept has increased in recent years due to its ascribed positive effects on individual career paths. Online social networking aims to strengthen informal ties, even within formal settings. These informal connections may ease the stress and stiffness of work-related tasks. People who are part of the informal social network provide resources or further contacts, and reciprocal advantages emerge among the networkers. Examples include simplifying workflows (“cutting through the red tape”), passing on strategic information and mentoring network members in their professional development.

Whereas networking traditionally takes place during conference breaks, in the office’s kitchenette or at the water dispenser, nowadays more and more business contacts are established online. “Social Networking once meant going to a social function such as a cocktail party, conference, or business luncheon. Today, much social networking is achieved through Web sites such as MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn” (Roberts & Roach, 2009, pp. 110-111)

For the majority of students the profile in a social networking community is a natural part of their everyday communication portfolio – just as indispensable as the cell phone or e-mail address.

Since student life is to a great and increasing degree mediated through social networking platforms, academic teachers can hardly ignore these environments.

Platforms such as MySpace and Facebook are likely to attract more student attention than the university’s learning management system. These “social” Web portals form a widely accepted virtual meeting point to deal with the social components of campus life.

This new gathering point challenges academic teachers to find a personal strategy for dealing with social networking sites. Should teachers leave the social networking playground to students or should they actively engage in social networking practices to open up a new communication channel with their students? What platforms are out there to choose from, what appeals to their respective target group and what are the prospects and problems of these Web sites?

Examples

In general, all social networking Web sites are used to organize social contacts online. However, networks differ in their character, which depends on the applications offered, the conventions of use and the kind of relationships displayed in the network. Depending on the character of the site, the member profile page highlights specific aspects of the user’s personality and interests and mediates how he or she interacts with other members. For instance, Facebook, which targets mainly students, features a high amount of informal communication and games, differing in this respect from the platform LinkedIn, which is particularly focused on professional contacts and thus features business recommendations and testimonials. There are numerous social networking sites, which differ greatly in their focus and reach. The following examples are either widely used or specifically target an academic audience:

Facebook: Founded in 2004, the platform has 300 million active users per month. Originally, Facebook was accessible for a limited target group. Until September 2006, users needed the e-mail address of a university to register. Still, students are the dominant member group, though other segments are picking up.

LinkedIn: Since its launch in 2003, the network has attracted 50 million users worldwide. The Web site allows registered users to maintain a contacts list with trusted business acquaintances (so called connections). For student supervisors it is a helpful tool to provide recommendations and support graduates entering the job market.

NING: In this Web community, groups can create and manage their own social network. Ning was launched in October 2005 and has more than 1.6 million members. Examples for e-learning related networks are the AACE Connect community organized by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) or the Special Interest Group Evaluation of Learners’ Experiences of E-Learning (ELESIG).

MySpace: Since its launch in 2004, the music community and other interest groups continue to heavily use MySpace. Each month 125 million users worldwide log in to their account, search for songs, bands and tour dates, add contacts and post their own photos and videos. Users may continue to access MySpace for political happenings such as the last presidential election or healthcare bill. A rubric dedicated to education and the organization of school events is MySpace School.

ResearchGATE was founded in May 2008. The platform aims to create an international network of scientists and has been quite successful so far. ResearchGATE has 180,000 members worldwide and grows with a rate of approximately 1000 new member registrations daily. The features are targeted to a scientific audience, for instance, supporting the “self archiving” of publications.

scholarz.net has been in existence since 2007 and has approximately 3000 members. The site is a mixture of citation management tool, search engine and meeting point for scholars. The start-up was originally a research project at the German University of Würzburg. The academic background along with its advertisement free environment adds to the credibility of the site. In the future, their business model foresees member fees.

Prospects

An important part of the university experience is building personal relationship networks. Contacts with fellow students are constantly negotiated, evaluated and maintained collaboratively. Whereas common activities strengthen relationships, inactivity renders them fragile or stagnant at best. Communicating through social networking pages is a means to foster and deepen interpersonal contacts. At this, users are by and large not attracted by the anonymity of the WWW. Despite the potential of global networking, a major amount of contacts maintained through social networks mirrors local binds and relationships to friends, study peers or working colleagues (Livingstone, 2008).

A heavily cited advantage of engaging in social networks goes back to the work and writings of Granovetter (1974). According to the researcher, strong social ties towards friends, neighbors or family members are less relevant for finding a job or choosing a career path than indirect or transient contacts (weak social ties). Social networking platforms make it easier to find indirect connections through visualizing second and third degree contacts. Thereby, one can, with little effort, leverage these contacts and make them a part of one‘s personal network. Plus, the profile page in a social networking site starts to replace the personal homepage. It opens up an easy way to gain experiences in designing Web pages and putting together references and other CV information.

All in all, social networking platforms can be seen as relationship management tools that answer everyday questions of student life. When again is the birthday of my new pal from the introductory course? How can I reach the members of my study group? Short status messages allow for easy navigation in one’s own social network, track activities and keep up to date. Although students use networks such as Facebook chiefly for informal communication, organizing learning activities is in many cases a sidekick to simply having fun.

Problems

The ubiquitous presence of social networking sites in campus life can develop an unwelcomed dynamic. As a matter of principle, the nature and amount of personal information displayed online should be a personal decision by the individual student. But when all fellow students, the tutors and even the teacher meet on facebook, how can one afford to stay behind? Once a member, the student has to cope with the continuous stream of information. Do I have to react to every short message? Should I also become a member in this new learning network? How many online identities can I manage at a time? The pressure and urge to be ubiquitously present and constantly online can turn out to be detrimental to a student’s learning experience.

The unchecked and uncontrollable aggregation of data and the potential for commercial leverage of member profiles are two central points of criticism when it comes to social networking. Different providers follow specific business models, e.g., collecting fees for special services or unlimited storage, advertising general and personalized products based on information in the members’ profiles.

The close interplay between the social networking profile and the person’s relationship management results in a state of dependence towards the provider. What happens when the provider changes the terms of use? Facebook, for example, introduced in 2006 the feature “Newsfeeds.” Many users protested against this decision that created more transparency and awareness of personal information (Boyd, 2008). In the end users can only choose between the two options of accommodating or leaving the platform altogether.

Likewise, the postings and comments of other users, which are displayed within one’s own profile, result in a loss of personal control. Each online identity needs continuous maintenance to be free of spam and other unwanted pictures, games or comments. This upkeep is particularly important since employers increasingly use the Internet for background checks.

Teaching and Learning Scenarios

Coordination: Several academic teachers started using Facebook as a tool for working together with colleagues, tutors, research assistants and students. The short messages and status notifications are ideal for arranging duties and coordinating cooperative tasks. As Sara Dixon from the department of psychology at St. Edward’s University puts it: “It is so fast . . . . They check their facebook profile more often than their email account.” The Creative Writing Network on Facebook is a collection of teaching material shared between academics. As the profile page says: “It’s a place to share book and article titles of craft criticism, announce events related to teaching creative writing, and discuss issues in our field.”
Narration: Brown & Donohue (2007) describe the use of social networking portals in literature studies. When discussing fictional characters in the classroom, a character specific MySpace-profile offers the link to a context students are familiar with: “[…] it can be useful to ask what that character’s MySpace page might look like — what might such a character include in their ‘Interests’ or ‘About Me’ section? The MySpace template offers students a way to talk about identity construction in familiar ways.”

Alumni: The German university RWTH Aachen uses the platform XING as a tool to support alumni. The alumni group was established in October 2004 and now has 9000 members. Another example is the facebook group from Thomas College or the University of California group on MySpace.

Lectures: The media informatics work group of Prof. Oliver Vornberger from the German University of Osnabrück has developed a plug-in for Facebook called social virtPresenter. It allows the distribution of lecture recordings via the social networking site. This supports social navigation through the lecture contents.

Conclusions

Whether or not academic teachers choose to create personal social networking profiles and the degree to which they make use of it is a personal decision, one that cannot be made unambiguously from a pedagogical point of view. Mazer et al. (2007) researched the influence of teachers’ Facebook profiles on student motivation, learning behavior and learning climate. In addition, students were allowed to comment on how appropriate they perceived the teachers’ Facebook profiles. Despite positive effects on student motivation in the experimental setting, the majority of subjects surveyed reported that an in-depth teacher profile appears to them as “unprofessional.”

Since student life is to a great and increasing degree mediated through social networking platforms, academic teachers can hardly ignore these environments. Knowledge and personal experience can help instructors to facilitate media competence, critical reflection and responsible use of social networking tools among students. Whenever an openly accessible Web site becomes part of the official learning environment, teachers have a certain responsibility for the way students present themselves and interact with each other online. If open social networks are to be used, it makes sense to develop a respective “netiquette.” Furthermore, teachers need to create awareness of privacy settings.

Social networks with an academic focus, such as ResearchGATE or scholarz, offer the advantage of features that are tailored to the target group of researchers and students. They offer options to manage citations, post presentations and articles, and support educational activities. This makes them a good starting point for teachers to get into social networking.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AACE, Advancement of Computing in Education, alumni, Boyd, Brown & Donohue, Creative Writing Network on Facebook, Facebook, German, Granovetter, LinkedIn, Livingstone, Mazer, MySpace, networking, Newsfeeds, Ning, Oliver Vornberger, portals, portfolio, ResearchGATE, Roberts & Roach, RWTH Aachen, scholarz.net, social virtPresenter, Thomas College, University of California, University of Osnabrück, XING | Leave a comment »

Reading Ability As a ‘New’ Challenge for Online Students

Posted on January 30, 2010 by JimS

Mary Alexander, Wayne Clugston, and Elizabeth Tice’s The R-Model for Learning Online and Achieving Lifelong Goals (San Diego: Bridgepoint Education, Inc., 2009) is a self-help guide to assessing readiness for online learning. Ashford News published a review (“Top Tips for Online Learning” 1.25.10) this past week, including a summary of attitudes and abilities required for success in the online classroom.

One of the key suggestions is “restructuring,” or rearranging “your life so that you have time to devote to your studies. Online learning removes the travel, parking and childcare issues related to driving to a brick-and-mortar campus, but there is no getting around the fact that you will have to carve out time to read, write, think and interact with instructors and peers.”

The list also includes a reminder to sharpen writing skills since, “as an online student, writing is your sole means of actively participating, building relationships and demonstrating active learning in an online environment.”

The review, however, does not include an item on reading readiness, or the problem of students unprepared for reading online (SUROs). I haven’t had a chance to review the book so I’m not sure if, in fact, this topic is covered. In any case, as an online instructor, I think the lack of effective reading skills is perhaps the biggest obstacle to success.

The crossover from F2F (face to face or real-time) to virtual classrooms is so widespread today that we tend to forget that these are actually very different environments. And one of the key differences is the role that reading plays in web-based classes. In F2F classes, reading is primarily associated with content in textbooks and articles. Procedural instructions are delivered orally and discussed, and printed handouts are used as reminders. In online classes, however, both procedural guidelines and content are accessible only through reading. The reading tasks online are therefore a significant departure from the traditional, and they require a whole new set of skills.

Despite all the advances in web technology, information on a computer screen is still presented one screen at a time.

This isolation of information in a two-dimensional frame creates a critical demand: students must be able to impose a time and space dimension on the information in the otherwise flat screen. Effective readers are able to take individual frames and use them to construct a dynamic, three-dimensional, real-time model. They’re able, in other words, to build a whole from disparate parts — a whole that also incorporates an accurate representation of the entire online learning experience from the first to last day of instruction as well as their own location, at any given time, within the model.

Effective readers are aware that each piece of information is an important part of a larger puzzle that’s continually evolving and that ignoring or forgetting a piece could be disastrous.

The critical difference between F2F and online classes is the sense of now, or knowing where one is in terms of time and space. F2F, students are always in the present, and the future is a linear path that extends from now into tomorrow, next week, etc. They know exactly where they are in the present, e.g., in their classroom, at their desk, on page two of the handout, with the instructor at the chalkboard and classmates seated around them.

Online, however, students don’t have the same sense of now because past, present, and future are equally accessible. They also don’t have the same sense of where they are in terms of classmates and activities since they can’t see others and what they’re doing.

F2F, students who are unwilling or unable to construct an accurate model can still manage to survive and even thrive by simply showing up for class and depending on others in their shared environment for cues. If others are noting a point made by the instructor, then it must be important. The instructor reminds them to turn to page three, now; toward the end of class, he reminds them to submit their drafts in the next session.

Online, these cues are missing from the screen the students are on at the moment.

Red flags for SUROs usually pop up in the first few days of instruction. Perhaps the most common for those who can’t or won’t accept the generative or active function of reading is the following post in discussions or email: “Help. I’ve read everything but don’t have a clue about what to do for this class. Can you (or someone) tell me what I’m supposed to do next?”

The instructor has clearly announced the importance of reviewing the schedule of activities daily, and the assignment that’s due “next” is boldly spelled out in the schedule, but this information is not directly in front of the student at the moment and, thus, doesn’t exist. The student has failed to add this information or, more importantly, the sources of this information to his/her mental construct of the class. In fact, the student’s image of the class is limited to the screen that happens to be in front of him and the other information is lumped into an amorphous mass.

The point is that reality is concrete, abstract, and dynamic, and students who can’t synthesize all three into a working model will have difficulty in an online class.

Another red flag is a student’s insistence on regular F2F or real-time contact with the instructor. These students need to establish and maintain a sense of here and now to get their bearings. They can’t function without the cues that are present in F2F environments. Once the instructor agrees to these real-time interactions, he/she falls into a semester-long trap and literally ends up tutoring the student in a traditional classroom, effectively teaching two classes instead of one, and this places a labor-intensive burden on the instructor.

Students who must have continuous F2F or real-time contact with the instructor simply aren’t ready for online learning.

A third red flag is the consistent failure to follow directions or guidelines. Reminders to do so are usually met with hostility, with the student insisting that he has read the guidelines many times over. For these students, out of sight is out of mind, literally. They’ve read the requirements, but once they’ve moved on to the next screen, the guidelines cease to exist in a form that could inform the current activity.

There are other red flags, I’m sure, but these should suffice for the argument that the reading challenge for online learning is considerable. I’m not sure exactly how to prepare or assist SUROs. I am certain, though, that providing real-time safety nets for them compounds rather than resolves the problem. I’m also certain that, in this day and age, the ability to learn — to reconstruct bits and pieces of virtual information into a real-time working model — online is essential.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Ashford News, Bridgepoint Education, Elizabeth Tice, Mary Alexander, restructuring, The R-Model for Learning Online and Achieving Lifelong Goals, Top Tips for Online Learning, Wayne Clugston | 4 Comments »

Berkeley High School May Eliminate Science Labs

Posted on January 26, 2010 by JimS

Just put the title of this article into your favorite search engine. The Berkeley High Governance Council (BHGC) has just voted to stop providing science labs to its students so that the roughly $400,000 cost can be redirected into programs to support struggling students.

Berkeley High School (BHS) has a number of features that most schools do not. It’s located in a community that includes lots of University professors and dot-com entrepreneurs and employees as well as plenty of African-American and Latino households.

BHS gives its science labs before and after normal school hours. Five teachers supervise these lab sessions. The reason for the unusual laboratory time scheduling appears to be overcrowding because lab space has been taken during normal school hours for non-lab instructional activities.

Blogs seem to be going wild over this proposed change with charges of racisim flying around like dust on a windy day. The achievement gap at BHS is well beyond national norms. These labs are being labeled as “white” courses. However, one AP teacher claims that her four AP Environmental Science course contain one-third minority students. No figures have been given for AP Physics, AP Biology, or AP Chemistry. The College Board does not label AP Environmental Science as a “laboratory science” course.

What’s to be done? Is the threat to close down the science labs just a threat, a ploy to get more money for remedial education? Does the BGHC really believe that science labs should go? The science department certainly does not. “The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing,” according to Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School’s science department.

This news brings a number of issues together at once and makes sorting them out difficult. It also brings focus on some important issues in education.

Regarding the achievement gap, BHS has an unusually large number of high-achieving students, a fact that skews the achievement gap. Low-achieving students at BHS may do better than in the average California school, although one report puts them below the national average. While that statistic does not remove the necessity for helping low-achieving students, it does make the BHGC action seem rather precipitate.

The necessity for holding special lab sessions in which students typically perform 19^th-century experiments in 19^th-century ways may be crumbling in the 21^st century. We all should be asking ourselves what future we’re preparing students for in these lab sessions. Realize that most science laboratory experiences are “poor” according to the National Research Council. Pipetting technique hardly qualifies as a necessity in today’s job market.

Schools have the means to provide valid lab experiences today that weren’t available before. Instead of removing labs for many students, they should be providing them for all students. Provide appropriate challenges to every student, and make those challenges real, not make-work. This issue goes far beyond science instruction. We face the problem that science just happens to cost more than other academic subjects. History, for example, escapes this dilemma because history courses don’t have labs. In fact, of all non-science school activities, only sports seems to have high-cost settings and major equipment costs.

Schools have the means to provide valid lab experiences today that weren’t available before. Instead of removing labs for many students, they should be providing them for all students.

All educators must rethink our educational system. We must face the fact that a large fraction of students entering school each year are unprepared to learn at the pace required. Finding ways to challenge every student to reach an optimal level of learning must be our goal. Some will begin behind, but many can catch up if challenged appropriately.

Science labs may be just a small piece of this puzzle, but they’re an important one. In these labs, if done properly, students will learn scientific thinking, an important tool for everyday life. They’ll come to understand the nature of science and so be better prepared to make important decisions involving science and technology, stuff that can be as mundane as selecting a laundry detergent. And they’ll have experience with empirical data, an experience that models the complex and ambiguous nature of life in our society today.

When taught well, science (and history too) can challenge students to improve reading and writing abilities as well as critical thinking. Science also helps with math skills. Investigating their world brings engagement to students. Engagement can, in the hands of good teachers, lead to motivation to learn communication skills and math. Thus, the science (and history) courses become the remediation courses for all but the most challenged of students.

Our current recession and global competition combined with the ferment of online education and charter schools have placed large burdens on our society. Technology, as usual, may be our downfall or our savior. We have no perfect solution. Let’s hope that BHS and others make informed and successful compromises that will ensure our future remains bright.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Berkeley High Governance Council, Berkeley High School, BHGC, Mardi Sicular-Mertens, National Research Council, science labs | Leave a comment »

Immediacy and Presence in Online Learning

Posted on January 25, 2010 by JimS

Credence Baker‘s study, “The Impact of Instructor Immediacy and Presence for Online Student Affective Learning, Cognition, and Motivation” in The Journal of Educators Online (7.1, January 2010), is a substantial contribution to online instructional pedagogy.

The study focuses on instructor presence and immediacy in online courses. Presence is manifested in “instructional design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction”; verbal immediacy, in behaviors such as “giving praise, using humor, using self-disclosure.”

Major findings:

“While instructor immediacy was shown to be positively related to student affective learning, cognition, and motivation, it was not shown to be a significant predictor.”
“Instructor presence . . . is a significant predictor of student affective learning, cognition, and motivation.”

Instructional activities that impact presence “include presenting content and questions, focusing the discussion on specific issues, summarizing discussion, confirming understanding, diagnosing misperceptions, injecting knowledge from diverse sources and responding to student’s technical concerns.”

According to Baker, a “limitation of the study is the self-reporting nature of the measurement instrument [online survey], which hinders the ability to control errors and bias in the participants’ responses.”

Breakdown of the subjects: “The data collected for this study included 377 (n=377) uniquely completed surveys submitted online. Of the 377 respondents, 265 were females and 112 were males. A total of 71 students (18.8 %) indicated that this was their first online course, and 306 students (81.2%) indicated that they had had previous online course experiences. One hundred forty-one (141) respondents (37.5%) reported being graduate students, whereas 236 respondents (62.5%) reported being undergraduate students.”

Comments

One of my concerns centers on the discreteness of the predictor variables, presence and immediacy, which tend to overlap in discussion activities. For example, instructor participation in online class forums, the most direct means of interaction, seems to incorporate both variables, complicating comparisons.

This concern, however, takes nothing away from the confirmation that course design (to establish presence) is critical for an online class, and, arguably, the most critical implication of this finding is the need to provide ongoing released time for online faculty to continually develop, maintain, and update their virtual learning environments.

Perhaps a second important implication to improve presence (and immediacy) is to explore the incorporation of discussion moderators for online forums. This role could be filled by selected students trained to facilitate discussions.

A third implication is probably controversial, but it needs to be examined — recruiting and hiring instructors who are skilled in developing and using online learning environments. Currently, most online instructors use course management systems (CMSs) maintained by information technology (IT) staff. Eventually, through in-service workshops, they become adept at getting the most out of the CMS. To strengthen online offerings, colleges may want to include CMS skill as a prerequisite for employment.

A fourth implication is that colleges may want to provide ongoing released time for the development of skills that take the instructor beyond the confines of CMSs as well as funds and IT support to implement innovations outside the boundaries of CMSs. Since course design is so critical, it may be time to open it up to influences and resources beyond the college’s IT department.

A fifth and final implication is the need for colleges to keep a finger on the pulse of current technology actually used by our students, who are increasingly turning to handheld communication devices that bridge the gap between cell phone and notebook computer. For many or most of our students, the boundary between face-to-face (F2F) and virtual is shrinking so rapidly that they no longer make a distinction between the two. For all practical purposes, they are one and the same. We may, in other words, have reached the point where the online vs. F2F controversy is, literally, academic.

Baker’s study comes at an opportune time, interrupting a relatively dead period in the dialogue on online instruction. This may be just the breakthrough needed to explore the next step in online education.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: and Motivation, CMS, Cognition, course management systems, Credence Baker, immediacy, online instructional pedagogy, presence, The Impact of Instructor Immediacy and Presence for Online Student Affective Learning, The Journal of Educators Online | Leave a comment »

Deconstructing STEM

Posted on January 14, 2010 by JimS

In K-12 education these days, you’ll see frequent use of the acronym, STEM. This word stands for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.” This term is so widespread that no one even seems to question its use. Yet, the inclusion of these four subjects and the exclusion of any other is actually rather arbitrary and tends to mislead the general public about the nature of these subjects and how to teach them. Possibly, it’s the push from industry for more employees trained in these areas that has resulted in this emphasis.

Many people, even in education, do not have a full understanding of the essential differences between these four subjects. Science teachers may present them to students as being essentially the same. Funding agencies are proposing lots of money for STEM education. What are they proposing to fund? Even if you know all about STEM, please take a moment to read the analysis below and comment on anything that’s incorrect or incomplete.

To begin with, why exclude other subjects? For example, physical education uses science, technology, engineering, and mathematics extensively. If the use of one subject by another is reason enough for inclusion in a grouping, then physical education certainly should be added to form something like STEPEM. You can make a case for inclusion of some other subjects as well. Roping off four subjects from everything else makes no real sense for education.

However, it’s the lumping together of these four that makes the least sense. Why not HELASSAWL, grouping history, English language arts, social science, arts, and world languages? Yeah, it’s a mouthful compared to STEM, but logically, it makes as much sense. To understand why, take a look at each of the four STEM subjects.

Mathematics began centuries ago as a means to an end. It was used to regulate trade (arithmetic) and to deal with land (geometry). Then, Euclid came along and made logical, step-by-step proofs the bedrock of geometry. Mathematics hasn’t been the same since. Instead of being just a means to an end, mathematics now stands by itself in pure abstraction with its proof-based system of functioning.

Something that hasn’t been proved in mathematics is merely a conjecture. Mathematicians don’t have to relate their work to anything going on in science, technology, or engineering. They start with axioms and build a tower of theorems, corollaries, and lemmas. Doing mathematics requires a special way of thinking and extensive training.

In total contrast to mathematics, science is all about disproof. Science doesn’t stand apart from the real world in abstractions. Science involves inquiry, exploration, and discovery within the context of reality. It’s a voyage into the world of ideas that develop into explanations of the universe. Scientific theories mean nothing unless they can be compared with real data.

Scientists know that they can never prove their theories. That’s one reason that they’re called theories. New data tomorrow could overturn or at least modify today’s favorite theory. Examples abound. The geocentric view of the universe was overturned (probably more than once) by the heliocentric theory, which itself was modified when all stars were found to be rotating around a galactic center.

Mathematics plays an important role in every branch of science. The eponymous Lord Kelvin, immortalized as a temperature scale, said, “When you measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it.” Mathematics then allows processing of those numbers. Whether physicists are doing quantum mechanics or biologists are making statistical analyses of experimental results, mathematics permeates science. Nevertheless, mathematics is not science. Doing science requires a special, nonintuitive way of thinking and extensive training.

Engineering is all about making things. Engineers use the knowledge they have of how things work to create new physical entities. Much of this knowledge comes from other engineers who have tried numerous approaches and found which work best, and the data used are empirical. Other knowledge comes from the discoveries of scientists.

Engineers design, build, and test. They create skyscrapers and highways, toasters and microwave ovens, automobiles and racing bicycles. Scientists discover; engineers create. These two acts, discovery and creation, seem to be wired into our brains so that we consider them to be very pleasurable. There’s little other connection between these two disciplines, except that they seem to require each other. The discoveries of science help to fuel new engineering, and the new stuff that engineers create often provides devices that scientists use in their research such as telescopes, microscopes, spectrophotometers, and so on. Engineers require extensive training.

Technology is the stuff that mankind creates. It comes originally from engineers and inventors.

Technology is the stuff that mankind creates. It comes originally from engineers and inventors. Building a fire and crafting a spear were early examples of using technology. Today, it’s hard to take a step without involving technology, for example, the technology represented by your shoes. Because technologies are closely tied with scientific discoveries and with engineering designs and creations, people may readily confuse these.

A course on technology, by itself, will be a rare occurrence in elementary and secondary schools. Instead, you find technology woven into K-12 science courses along with engineering (e.g., robotics). Technology makes our lives easier, delivers better health, and allows us to explore places previously inaccessible. It also complicates our lives, pollutes our environment in numerous ways, and requires us to extract our planet’s resources to feed it.

Scientists discovered the ideas that made today’s flat panel televisions possible. Engineers turned these ideas along with engineering principles into televisions. The technology consists of the televisions, all of their pieces and parts, and the means to capture and send the images and sound to the individual televisions. In all of these activities, the scientists and engineers use lots of mathematics, but mathematicians play no role in creating televisions. A technologically literate person will know much about the technologies involved in delivering the television experience to living rooms but may not be familiar with the engineering principles involved in the design. This same person may not understand the nature of science either.

Interestingly, the California Institute of Technology provides bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, many branches of science, and several disciplines of engineering. However, there’s no degree in technology.

This conflation of four terms into STEM, an artificial thing that we’re supposed to be excited about teaching to K-12 students, makes little sense. Science and mathematics departments like it because it elevates them somewhat in the din of the discussion of how to improve education. Here’s what’s actually happening on the ground in many school districts. The districts receive some federal money for improving education. The various departments put in their proposals for a piece of this funding. ELA (English language arts) and mathematics ask for more, in total, than is available and receive all of the money. The science and history departments, not to mention music, arts, physical education, and others, get nothing.

The push for improved reading and mathematics scores trumps everything else and shortchanges the places where real learning takes place. But that’s material for another column.

[Note: The paragraphs on technology were revised by the author after initial publication. 1.15.10]

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: and mathematics, California Institute of Technology, disproof, ELA, engineering, English language arts, Euclid, geocentric view, heliocentric theory, Lord Kelvin, Science, STEM, technologists, Technology | 6 Comments »

Picture the Story: E-Comics as Teaching Tool

Posted on January 13, 2010 by JimS

By Stefanie Panke
Editor, Social Software in Education

Adding decorative visualizations to learning content is supposed to render educational material more interesting and motivate students. Though entertaining pictures may distract learners and add to the cognitive load, instructional designers seek to avoid the creation of textual wasteland devoid of graphic oases. Thus, the purposeful and selective use of e-comics and other ornamental illustrations is by all means an ingredient in the e-learning design repertoire.

As a graphic medium of storytelling, comics combine pictorial elements with more or less scarcely used text modules – often in the form of speech bubbles. This results in a dialogic style of narration. One way to use this form of narration in instructional design is to depict controversial topics by engaging two characters in a dispute. Another possibility is to trace historic developments and events as pictorial sequences. Following ideas of anchored instruction, comics can picture a scenario or problem that forms the starting point for investigating the learning content. Finally, comics can also be used to simply loosen the ground, i.e., by including a sketch, learning material can be rendered less dense.

There are a number of Web based tools for the design of educational picture stories. They offer a broad variety of elements to create a comic strip, including a drag and drop feature that facilitates the use of this medium significantly.

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Toondoo is a comprehensive, yet easy to use flash application to create comics. It comprises a variety of premade backgrounds, figures and objects. Moreover, you can upload your own photos and graphic materials and create new avatars using a step-by-step wizard. All objects can be aligned, enlarged, reduced, placed in the foreground or background, copied, deleted and more. Besides, you can change the pose and facial expression of the figures. The rubric ImageR allows you to cut, crop and alienate photos – however, a basic desktop photo editor such as Picasa or Irfanview provides more options and better handling. This also applies to the embedded drawing tool Doodler. In contrast, the feature Book Maker proves to be an extremely useful add-on. It allows you to combine several ComicStrips into a book – a great way to present a class project or group work. You can download your completed comics as PNG-files or store them within the toondoo website in a password protected area.

Pixton is an alternative environment to generate comics from existing models. The process is easy to learn and the expressiveness of the figures is impressive. The Web application offers a wide selection of poses, gestures and mimics. The variety of background images is, in contrast, less comprehensive. In designing a comic, the you can choose between three different formats: The option “Regular” leads to a drag & drop editor, which allows the free arrangement of elements. The option “Quickie” leads to a selection of prearranged settings with figures and speech bubbles. The “Large Format” can be used to design a single, large-scale scene. The completed comics are retrievable through a unique URL and publicly accessible. You can embed their products into your personal websites as flash files. Print and download options are available as well, but require a premium membership.

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Comiqs is an easy to use environment to turn photos into online picture stories. Based on flash, the tool is particularly interesting for members of the photo sharing community flickr. Pictures can be uploaded or imported from your personal flickr account. Afterwards, straightforward editing options allow you to arrange photos as comic strips and add speech bubbles.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Book Maker, ComicStrips, Comiqs, Doodler, E-Comics, flickr, ImageR, Irfanview, Picasa, Pixton, PNG-files, Quickie, speech bubbles, Toondoo | 3 Comments »

A Technological Solution to Prerequisite Skills

Posted on January 13, 2010 by JimS

The Problem of Prerequisite Skills

She was a grade 5-6 multi-age teacher, and she was frustrated. She had just graded a basic multi-digit multiplication test. Most of the students had done well, but a large number had done poorly. There was no one in the middle. She suddenly had a revelation. All the students who did poorly were new to her this year—all the rest had been with her the year before. She looked at the poor tests more carefully and then realized those students were mostly missing the same questions.

What could it be about those questions? She studied them and realized that they all had a 0 (zero) somewhere in the digits. It only took a few more minutes to realize that the students were all treating multiplication by zero as if it were multiplication by one. She realized that she had not taught the zero multiplication rule to this group. She took them aside and gave them a quick lesson, after which they repeated the test with high scores.

How much student failure is caused by teaching students something that assumes they already have skills they do not indeed have? As this true story above illustrates, sometimes a very small and easily-taught skill can be all that is required to lift a student from failure to success. Unfortunately, few of us have the time that this teacher took on this one test, and even then, it took a certain amount of luck for her to spot the problem. How many similar potential revelations passed by her unnoticed?

Although intelligent curriculum design can solve many of these problems, this is the area where developing technology may be able to do the most good in the coming years.

One of my first reviews of an online curriculum was for AP Language and Composition, a course students frequently take in their junior year. In the very first unit, the students did a reading, after which they were required to write an essay in which they explained the author’s use of rhetorical devices in the piece. The unit had no instruction in rhetorical devices. This curriculum writer was from a prestigious, high achieving school so, perhaps, he was used to students walking into his class with the ability to complete this assignment, but I would bet that at least 90% of the juniors in America have never seen the phrase rhetorical devices before.

A little common sense in curriculum design goes a long way—don’t expect too much prior learning before a course begins. Once we pass that hurdle, though, we see how technology can help. If we can examine every course and lesson we teach and identify the prerequisite skills, we can then create a list of those skills. If the course writer expects students entering a class to be familiar with rhetorical devices, then that should be included in the course plan. Once we have such a list, we can create pre-tests to ensure students have the necessary skills to complete the course.

A Technological Solution

This is where technology can really help. We could create a library of learning objects for these critical skills. Students who need assistance with a prerequisite skill would be directed to a lesson to bring them up to speed as quickly as possible. A curriculum designer planning a lesson would identify the skills necessary for success. Some of them would be taught in the lesson itself, but others that should have been learned previously would be omitted. When students have not had the prior learning, they would be directed to the necessary learning object for remediation.

Ultimately, in many cases, the technology would make this happen automatically. Someday a computer analysis of a multiplication test will be able to indicate that students failed because they did not know how to multiply by zero, and it will direct those students to an appropriate lesson. We have some basic programs in math and reading that do some of this already, but this feature is rarely integrated into regular online classes at this time. Furthermore, it usually requires students to leave the regular class and enter a separate program, a process that does not work well for a variety of reasons. In the future, all such learning must be integrated into one learning package.

But even with today’s technology much of this can be done. We can create that library of learning objects easily right now, and we can direct students to appropriate lessons right now. We can adopt instructional policies that reward students who use these processes to reach higher levels of achievement rather than punish them for starting at a lower level.

All we need is the will to do it.

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Live by Example

Posted on January 11, 2010 by JimS

As previously discussed in this column, when it comes to Twitter, there is no “right way” to do things. Learning the right balance of tweets, re-tweets and replies to meet your needs and increase your return on (time) investment is a learning process like any other. For this column, I’ve compiled a list of educators and technologists that I look to as good examples of using Twitter in an approachable way to network, share, learn and grow.

Programs:

@MAET – Michigan State University Master of Arts in Educational Technology – Shares information on upcoming program events as well as what is new in educational technology. This account is excellent at interacting with program students and others.

@CapMSU – Michigan State University Campus Archaeology – @CapMSU – The MSU Campus Archaeology program excavates sites around the MSU campus and shares their findings with the campus community. This account provides a fascinating historical perspective and shows us what archaeologists do and how they work.

Individuals:

@gravesle – Michigan State University – Leigh is the coordinator of MSU’s Master of Arts in Educational Technology program and shares excellent articles and resources.

@Tjoosten – University of Wisconsin Milwaukee – Tanya is very open to sharing her adventures in educational technology at UWM and has great information.

@UWM_CIO – University of Wisconsin Milwaukee – Bruce Maas is the CIO for the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and very accessible to education colleagues on Twitter. He’s an excellent example of transparency and availability in leadership.

@NealCross – Southwest Baptist University – Neal is an instructor, a learning management system administrator, and very collaborative in his work. He is interactive, helpful and fun to follow.

@Captain_Primate – Michigan State University – Ethan is a professor at MSU and an expert in digital humanities. He is an evangelist for open access teaching and learning, and he teaches his courses outside of the central campus learning management system, using WordPress and more.

@kevinoshea – Purdue University – Kevin is a technologist working closely with online education and is adept at putting Web 2.0 tools to work.

Publications/Organizations:

@Educause, @EducauseReview – EDUCAUSE is a non-profit association with the mission of advancing “higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” Stay apprised of upcoming events, interesting educational technology news and new study data by following them on Twitter.

@mashable – Mashable is not geared specifically toward higher education, but they offer excellent, short articles on Web 2.0 tools and innovative ways to use them. I get much of my technology news from Mashable and have found them to be an invaluable resource for explaining how things work.

Businesses:

TechSmith: @TechSmith, @TechsmithEDU, @jingTips, @SnagItTips – TechSmith takes a very approachable stance with their customers, offering beta membership, technical support and tips via Twitter. They are always on the lookout for people using their products in innovative ways.

Biggby Coffee: @BiggbyBob, @T_C_B, @BiggbyJedi, @BiggbyFelicity – Biggby Coffee could write the book on using social media in business. The company founders are active, reaching out to customers and offering glimpses of what goes on behind the scenes. Employees obviously love the company, making the excitement contagious.

Insomniac Games: @insomniacgames is an independent video game developer that takes support to new heights using Twitter. Have a question about one of their games? Ask them on Twitter and you’ll often have a response the same day.

Who do you follow that you find interesting? Would you like to add to this list? Please e-mail your favorites to jlknott@gmail.com. You should also follow @etcjournal on Twitter for information and updates each time a new article is posted.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: @CapMSU, @Captain_Primate, @EducauseReview, @gravesle, @kevinoshea, @MAET, @mashable, @NealCross, @Tjoosten, @UWM_CIO, Biggby Coffee, EduCause, Insomniac Games, Michigan State University, Purdue University, re-tweets, Southern Baptist University, TechSmith, tweets, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee | 6 Comments »

Value Learning Design, Not E-learning Design

Posted on January 8, 2010 by JimS

By Tom Preskett

I’ve been reflecting over the last few days on common questions I’m asked as I go about my job as a Learning Technologist. Questions like “I don’t have time to think about this” or “Why should I use this?” come up a lot. It’s clear to me now that a key skill in my role is to be able to respond to these questions effectively, in such a way as to cause the questioners to rethink their position and open up to a new viewpoint. I can tell you now that this isn’t easy. Here are some pointers:

In my education context, the worst thing you can do is throw blame around and talk about “what we need to do” rather than “it’s terrible that we don’t do such and such.”

Another important point is to relate your talk to your audience. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, among educators in 2010, understanding of learning technology is low so talks about it may be confusing and off-putting. Also, you want to be talking about processes and value they understand and can relate to. Further, it should always be about how the technologies fit into the bigger picture and if you just bang on about the ICT it’ll feel alien to their world.

I also like to stress the the possible incorporating of learning technologies is an element of the learning design process. So, as an organisation, the key is to value learning design; to value giving time and space to reflect and think about how you teach. The potential use of learning technologies is part of this process in the sense that they exist as tools in the toolbox from which you pick and choose. I spoke about the tools in the toolbox metaphor a few days ago. Valuing learning design is key, and it comes from the educators themselves and the management of organisations. So the subtle difference here is that you are NOT pushing e-learning because it ticks a box that needs to be ticked, but you ARE promoting good teaching and learning by engendering a culture of giving time and space to reflect on learning design.

Yes, there is learning to be done. But I think a good quality educator should be prepared to continually learn and adapt. Learning and adapting is an important part of living.

Learning online isn’t different to learning offline. Learning is the same as it’s been forever.

The change isn’t so drastic. Learning online isn’t different to learning offline. Learning is the same as it’s been forever. Learning strategies may change as we have more options (more tools), but the end result is the same thing you’ve always been asked to deliver. All you need to do is understand how to work the new tools and, more importantly, understand the values behind each.

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The Best of Education, the Worst of Education

Posted on January 6, 2010 by JimS

If you’ve been paying attention to online education, you’ve seen the hype about how great it is. You may also have noticed that Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education for the Obama administration, is a big fan of online education. He sees it as a source of new ideas.

Online learning certainly is revolutionary as was steam power, for example, or electricity. But it’s what we do with it that will make the difference. Suppose that you had the opportunity to create a new online learning school. A venture capitalist has provided you with funds, and now you must decide how to proceed. What will you create?

Each choice you make will impact the quality of education that your students receive and will also impact your bottom line. You choices will also affect the teaching experience in your school, your ability to hire good people, the quality of your Internet connection, and so on. Consider these as secondary issues when compared to product quality (i.e., how well your students are educated) and profitability. I focus on these two because they often are at odds with one another.

Online technology promises great education everywhere at low cost. The Internet is becoming ubiquitous. Even very poor countries around the world now have improved Internet access as fiber optic cables are laid to reach them. Here, in the United States, although we lag behind some industrialized nations, access is improving, and most rural locations receive some form of Internet access at a reasonable cost.

Because the cost of servers and broadband access is much lower than that of buildings and buses, the cost of delivering online education must be lower than that of traditional education. As better software tools become available, online teachers will be able to handle as many students as, or more than, their traditional counterparts with equal or better attention to individuals. As a side benefit, these teachers also do not have to commute, saving energy and carbon emissions.

Just imagine that you have no limits on spending and are allowed many years before profitability becomes an issue. You could find the best software for tracking student progress and providing just-in-time intervention if a student has problems. You could locate the best social networking software for allowing productive discussions about the current class topics. You could create curricula that engage students with creative thinking rather than memorizing for tests. You could use the newest multimedia technology to deliver compelling lessons – even in 3-D and Dolby sound. Teachers would become guides, coaches, and mentors helping students to find their own way. Course software would automatically determine when students must have more help and provide it if available or inform the teacher to take action. The software would also inform administrators about these incidents so that new learning threads could be created.

The combination of great teachers, well-trained in online instruction, dynamic software, worldwide social interaction, a database of all student online activity, data mining software that seeks out patterns in that database, and dedicated creative administrators might just build the best education system imaginable. Current traditional classroom education could not hold a candle to it.

However, we don’t live in this utopian world. The bottom line pulls like an albatross and constantly deflects our trajectory. In education, you have little ability to raise your prices. Charter schools, for example, have a fixed amount they receive per student. Even private schools have to deal with competition. Online schools do not have century-old tradition and decades of alumni to attract students and contribute in fund-raising drives. The quest for more profit must focus on costs.

Your school can achieve tremendous cost savings simply by not giving classes. You may laugh before you realize that some online diploma mills are giving diplomas for “life experience.” The highest costs for running online schools appear to be course creation and teacher salaries. The former occurs at the beginning, and the latter is recurring. You can reduce your start-up costs by hiring teachers who already have the courses designed or simply follow a textbook. The latter costs may be reduced by hiring teachers as 1099 employees who contract with you and are paid based on some formula related to the number of students. That way, you don’t offer benefits.

If you pay your teachers W2 salaries, then you reduce costs by increasing the number of students supervised. You also can avoid assigning students to a particular teacher. Instead, the first available qualified teacher handles the next student question. You can reduce or eliminate moderated discussions in classes so that teachers can deal with a larger number of students.

In short, you can minimize the costs of your online school by emulating the worst practices of traditional schools and then finding ways to make your education product even lower in quality than possible in such classes. You’ve turned your class into an online version of Princeton Review or Barron’s review notes and practice exams.

With online classes about to be at least a partial school experience for half of our students and with online tools becoming widespread even in traditional classrooms (sometimes as homework), it’s critically important that we, as a society, work for the best outcome.

I have found science courses offered by online schools that have no lab experience at all, not even virtual. Because few standardized tests actually test for the learning that should take place with such lab experience, it’s not surprising that these online science classes can produce good scores on standardized tests. The courses present the science concepts that will be tested, allow students to memorize them, and provide practice in preparation for the tests. They do not develop the students’ concept of the nature of science and do not exercise scientific reasoning skills. They certainly don’t allow students to collect or even work with empirical data. They’re just “teaching to the test.”

With online classes about to be at least a partial school experience for half of our students and with online tools becoming widespread even in traditional classrooms (sometimes as homework), it’s critically important that we, as a society, work for the best outcome.

At this moment in time, we have a choice. We can have the best of education, better than previously possible for large numbers of students, or we can have the worst of education, worse even than failing schools in large urban districts. We get to choose, but only if we act for our future, which depends on the quality of our education system for every student, and if we don’t get caught up in any “back to basics” movement. Our success lies in the future and not in the past. We need to use the best ideas available, many very old (e.g., Socratic method), and the newest technologies, but we should use these technologies with care and not just because they’re new and exciting.

Internet technology provides the biggest change to education since the invention of the printing press. Let’s use it well!

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Solving the Problem of Learning Styles

Posted on January 5, 2010 by JimS

Rob and Maria are two fictional students who appear in Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Christensen, Horn, and Johnson. In the early stages of the book we see Rob struggling to understand a concept in chemistry that Maria picks up easily. Fortunately, Rob’s father has not forgotten those lessons, and he is able to help Rob understand by using a different instructional approach from the one used by Rob’s teacher. The lesson the book would have us learn is that the teacher used an instructional process that fit Maria’s learning style, but Rob needed an approach that matched his learning style in order to find success. The book looks forward to a day in which emerging technology related to online education will allow instruction to match learning styles and bring educational success to everyone.

The concept is seductively simple. A student’s learning style is assessed at the beginning of the class, and the results are used to direct him or her through a succession of learning activities designed to meet his learning needs. As you explore the concept, though, you begin to see that it isn’t all that easy. Ironically, a little more study may suggest the opposite—that it is even easier than it looks.

The first problem is determining what we mean by learning styles. Most readers probably think they know because they took a workshop or read a book that taught the concept. Most readers are probably thinking along the lines of Visual—Auditory—Kinesthetic. That is not, however, the only theory of learning styles. In fact, my own research indicates that there are at least 100 different theories of learning styles, and many are significantly different from one another. While I have certainly not looked at all 100, the ones I have reviewed all seem to make sense to some degree, but they all seem incomplete as well. I have never found one that perfectly matches the student differences I saw in my teaching career.

What kinds of lessons can we create that work most effectively with the identified [learning] styles?

But let’s say we could come to agreement on an identifiable set of learning styles. What would we do about it? Would we send the student down a path in which every lesson has the same instructional qualities? Most theorists say that you then design instruction to match the learning style, but others say the opposite, that we need to strengthen the weaker areas. What kinds of lessons can we create that work most effectively with the identified styles?

And at what cost will this be? Will each course have to be essentially four to five courses running in roughly parallel paths? It costs enough to make one course, let alone four different courses that somehow interweave.

A number of years ago I had an enlightening experience that may point the way toward a solution, one that is within the means of present technology. Back when people were first realizing that IDEA contained Section 504, which required regular classroom teachers to accommodate the identified learning needs of students, I wrote an article on this on behalf of the school district’s special education director. She gave me a pile of newly compiled documents detailing accommodation suggestions for various handicapping conditions so I could include examples in my article. I was surprised to find that the same instructional strategies were being suggested over and over again for different handicapping conditions. A teacher who routinely used a relative handful of methodologies would have almost never had to change instruction to accommodate any student.

When I asked the special education director about this, she explained that all students, regardless of ability, learn better when these methodologies are used. It’s just that some students have the motivation and the ability to learn without those methods, while other student must have those methods to succeed. Unfortunately, those effective methods are not the most popular ones in education, especially at the secondary and post secondary levels.

So let’s look again at Maria and Rob, whose chemistry teacher presented a traditional fact and math-based lecture on gas laws that Maria understood but which Rob did not. Rob was able to get the lesson later when his father used some visual aids to enhance understanding. I contend that if the teacher had used a different approach, not only would Rob have gotten it, but Maria would have gotten it more easily as well. In other words, Maria was able to overcome the teacher’s weak instruction, but Rob was not.

All students, regardless of learning styles, learn better when they are in an educational environment that includes active learning, mastery learning, engaging tasks, and higher order thinking.

When I first started experimenting with innovative instructional approaches, I was teaching the extremes of secondary education—I had both Advanced Placement and ninth grade remedial classes. At first I tried these methods in the remedial classes, and I was immediately rewarded with significant improvement. I maintained a more traditional approach in the AP classes since they were doing well enough, I thought. Eventually the methods migrated to AP as well, where, to my surprise, they had an even greater effect than in the remedial classes. By the time enough years had passed that I had former ninth grade remedial students passing the AP exam, I was sold.

All students, regardless of learning styles, learn better when they are in an educational environment that includes active learning, mastery learning, engaging tasks, and higher order thinking. We simply need to provide a wide variety of such learning activities throughout our classes.

So can this be done in online education?

The first time we ever had a special education student enroll in our online school, a very unhappy special education teacher pointed at the student’s IEP, with its page-long list of required modifications, and asked us how we were going to meet all those needs. So we looked at them .The first was that the student had to be allowed to take notes on a laptop. OK. The next was that he had to be allowed extended time on tests. OK—our tests were generally untimed. By the time we had read through the list, she saw that fully 90% of the requirements were met simply by his being in an online environment.

A well designed, varied online curriculum, with a variety of multimedia pieces and engaging learning activities, can meet the needs of students with varied learning styles, even without major advances in technology. It can do many of those things even better than it can be done in a regular classroom.

So I am confident that we can meet the needs of students with varied learning styles. I believe the bigger problems we face involve prerequisite skills, sequencing, and transfer loads, but those topics will have to wait for future columns.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: auditory, Christensen, Disrupting Class, Horn, How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, IDEA, Johnson, Kinesthetic, Section 504, visual | 8 Comments »

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 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.

Hybrid Education: Sharing the Teaching

Posted on December 11, 2009 by JimS

By 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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The Holocaust and Technology

Posted on December 5, 2009 by JimS

By Lynn Zimmerman
Editor, Teacher Education

I recently attended the Ethel LeFrak Holocaust Education Conference which is sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University in Greensburgh, PA. This conference is geared for educators who teach about the Holocaust and genocide. You may be thinking, what is the relevance to this conference and ETC?

There were three ways in which technology and technology issues were relevant. First of all, as is pretty much the norm in today’s world, email and the Internet were used for the logistics of the conference. The call for proposals was posted online, and it was also emailed to attendees and presenters of previous conferences. The conference was advertised using online technology. Communication with presenters and attendees was online.

Secondly, most of the presentations used a wide range of computer technology, from PowerPoint presentations to DVDs to linking to web sites. For example, my own presentation combined all three. Some of the PowerPoint presentations were fairly straightforward. However, one presenter used an interactive PowerPoint presentation which was quite sophisticated. Again, this type of technology use is not new. It is a rare presentation today that does not use some form of computer technology.

However, the third way in which technology was used and discussed at the conference is what actually prompted me to write this essay. World War II ended 64 years ago. That means that Holocaust survivors are an aging and, frankly, dying population. One of the key questions and concerns at the conference this year was: what do we do when there are no more survivors? Survivor testimony is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools for teaching about the Holocaust. Pictures of the atrocities shock, dismay and disgust, but they are inanimate, as are films, documentaries, and even books. None of them bring the horror of what Hannah Arendt referred to as the banality of evil that was perpetuated as clearly as hearing and talking to a living person who experienced these horrific events. According to Holocaust educators, teaching about the Holocaust should be more than teaching about facts and figures. It should have an emotional impact so that its lessons will not be easily forgotten. The goal of Holocaust education is not merely to inform, but to bring an end to the violence and hatred that bring about genocide and mass killings.

Ephraim Kaye of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem focused his session, titled “Using New Technologies to Study and Teach the Holocaust,” on the various ways that technology can help accomplish these ends (see the bottom of the webpage for a summary of his remarks). Yad Vashem has a range of materials available online. Besides the traditional videos, lessons, and Internet links, they also incorporate YouTube to present material in English, Arabic, and Farsi. Kaye also pointed out that as a result of computerizing survivor names there have been family reunions after decades of separation.

However, Kaye also pointed out technology has a serious downside that can be a challenge for educators. With the advent of the Internet, the proliferation of hate sites and Holocaust denial sites has increased. He states: “This challenge makes it imperative that educators teach students to be savvy and discriminating about the information they access online.” (There are a number of good sites which address information literacy skills, such as this one from Rosemount High School in Rosemount, MN.

However, to return to the original question of what do we do when there are no more survivors, let’s look at what is being done. The US Shoah Institute at the University of Southern California has documented “nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses in 32 languages and from 56 countries.” The US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and many other Holocaust museums around the country have archives of taped survivor testimony. Many Holocaust education websites for teachers, such as The Tennessee Holocaust Commission, have access to survivor testimony.

However, Yad Vashem developed the idea of combining survivor testimony using a documentary style. Rather than merely being the “talking heads” accounts that are the norm, Yad Vashem has attempted to create documentaries with more depth. Survivors are taken back to places, such as their hometowns in Poland, Germany, or the Ukraine, and/or back to the concentration camps where they were incarcerated, and filmed as they walk around and talk about their lives, and how they changed forever during the Holocaust. For many of these survivors, this is the first time they have returned to these places, and hearing them reminisce about their lives and talk about the changes creates a more emotional impact than just hearing someone talk about their life while seated in their living room. The viewer is reminded that this is about a specific human life, not just some person who has no past or no future. One of the critical components of this format is that it “closes the circle” so that the viewer can gain an understanding of the survivor’s whole life experience.

For Holocaust educators, modern computer technology provides ways that can give depth and breadth to this difficult topic. Not only can we access archives and documents of historical and current events related to the Holocaust, modern technology provides educators and students ways to connect with others that were unthought of just a few years ago. For example, the Maine Holocaust Education Network maintains a Ning that has a link to the US Holocasut Museum Twitter Feed.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Arabic, banality of evil, Ephraim Kaye, Ethel LeFrak Holocaust Education Conference, Farsi, genocide, Germany, Greensburgh, Hannah Arendt, Holocaust denial sites, Holocaust educators, Jerusalem, Maine Holocaust Education Network, mass killings, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, Ning, Poland, Rosemount, Rosemount High School, Seton Hill University, The Tennessee Holocaust Commission, Ukraine, University of Southern California, US Holocasut Museum Twitter Feed, US Holocaust Museum, US Shoah Institute, Yad Vashem | 1 Comment »

College Prepared to Go Online When Disaster Strikes

Posted on December 4, 2009 by JimS

The 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).

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.”

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Ancilla, Chicago, CMS, college, Computers, Course management system, course shells, Donaldson, Emergency, F2F, face to face, Indiana, Internet, Learning Management System, learning software platform, LMS, modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment, moodle, online preparation for emergency needs, OPEN, open-source, Plan, pre-load, Preparedness, The Learning House, Totally Online, virtual learning environment, VLE | 1 Comment »

If Education Is to Succeed . . .

Posted on December 4, 2009 by JimS

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.

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

By 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.

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.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: class, discussion, Education, forum, Hybrid, Interactive, learning, management, Online, system | Leave a comment »

A Quick Hello

Posted on December 3, 2009 by JimS

“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?

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.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Jessica Knott, Michigan State University, Twitter | 2 Comments »

Interactive Whiteboards – Fix or Fad?

Posted on December 2, 2009 by JimS

By 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.

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.

The learner-response device, a handheld voting device or “clicker.”
Use of graphics and other visuals to represent information.
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.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: ASCD, interactive whiteboards, IWB, Marzano, Robert J. Marzano, Voting devices | 1 Comment »

OT Phishing Scam via Twitter

Posted on November 25, 2009 by Claude Almansi

By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

There is a phishing scam going round via Twitter direct messages sent from already compromised accounts. The message says something like “Is this (from) you?”, followed by an apparently legit link, but which redirects to a scam page that asks you to log into your Twitter account.

If you do, the phisher can in turn use your account to send the same message to all your contacts. And so on. The problem is that the phisher can also use your account to send other messages, like: “I’ve been robbed while I was in X on holiday, can you send me some money I’ll repay as soon as I get home”, for instance.

So, just as with e-mail phishing scam, the best way is not to click on the link. But if you’ve clicked, not to enter your account data unless you are rock-sure the request is from twitter. And if you have entered your account data, to change your password as fast as possible, and warn your contacts about the scam.

That’s what I am doing with this post, because I got caught too. I realized it a few seconds later and changed the password for the ETCjournal twitter account immediately. Although no direct messages were apparently sent from that account during these few seconds before I did, it seems safer to send this warning.

In general: the tweets from the ETCjournal twitter account are automatically generated from its two feeds, Entries RSS and Comments RSS, via twitterfeed. So any twitter message by ETCjournal that does not bear the mention “from twitterfeed” should be considered a priori suspect.

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i3 Funding Process Unfair to Small Businesses

Posted on November 24, 2009 by JimS

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

The comment period for the $650 million Department of Education’s “Investing in Innovation Fund,” referred to as i3, has ended. An article in Education Week discusses the main thrusts of these comments. For the entire text of the proposed priorities, click here.

Some large urban school districts object to small rural districts being favored. Small rural districts have problems with devoting resources to writing such complex grant applications and with conducting the studies requested in the guidelines. A requirement for 20% matching funds from the private sector, including foundations, has also received criticism because of the very short time frame. Some districts complain of the “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) requirement.

My perspective is that of a small business president. For this purposes of comment, it only matters that I have been working on innovation in education for over ten years and have encountered just about every road block to having schools use my innovative services as you can imagine.

The i3 guidelines allow three different types of proposals: scale-up grants of up to $50 million, validation grants of up to $30 million, and development grants of up to $5 million. The last of these requires a two-stage application process and does not require the high level of studies with proven results that the other two do.

Here’s the description of the scale-up grants. (Emphasis added.)

Scale-up grants would provide funding to scale up practices, strategies, or programs for which there is strong evidence (as defined in this notice) that the proposed practice, strategy, or program will have a statistically significant effect on improving student achievement or student growth, closing achievement gaps, decreasing dropout rates, or increasing high school graduation rates, and that the effect of implementing the proposed practice, strategy, or program will be substantial and important.

Validation grants are described in the following way. (Emphasis added.)

Validation grants would provide funding to support practices, strategies, or programs that show promise, but for which there is currently only moderate evidence (as defined in this notice) that the proposed practice, strategy, or program will have a statistically significant effect on improving student achievement or student growth, closing achievement gaps, decreasing dropout rates, or increasing high school graduation rates, and that with further study, the effect of implementing the proposed practice, strategy, or program may prove to be substantial and important.

Click the image for the PowerPoint presentation.

This is how development grants are explained.

Development grants would provide funding to support new, high-potential, and relatively untested practices, strategies, or programs whose efficacy should be systematically studied. An applicant would have to provide evidence that the proposed practice, strategy, or program, or one similar to it, has been attempted previously, albeit on a limited scale or in a limited setting, and yielded promising results that suggest that more formal and systematic study is warranted. An applicant must provide a rationale for the proposed practice, strategy, or program that is based on research findings or reasonable hypotheses, including related research or theories in education and other sectors.

Only school districts and nonprofit education businesses may apply. Entrepreneurs who provide tools are not eligible.

Note that the largest awards require “strong evidence.” Those districts that choose to submit “scale up” proposals must include innovations with this evidence. “Strong evidence means evidence from previous studies whose designs can support causal conclusions . . . and studies that in total include enough of the range of participants and settings to support scaling up to the State, regional, or national level . . . .”

It’s a very reasonable assumption that most of the new, innovative tools for education will come from small businesses. In the difficult education marketplace, having a new and better way to provide some aspect of education provides an edge over large existing businesses. The large education companies have an established way of doing business and usually will not seek change unless forced to do so by the market.

The i3 guidelines, however, are skewed toward large entities by their requirements for studies, which are quite expensive to carry out.

The i3 guidelines, however, are skewed toward large entities by their requirements for studies, which are quite expensive to carry out. My business has not been able to do a study and most of those I’ve looked at have the same problem. This basic problem seems to pervade many federal and state operations. The large businesses that can afford lobbyists, studies, extensive marketing, and other activities not accessible to their smaller kin get the bulk of federal largesse.

Besides, education studies often have flaws. I’ve seen two studies produce opposite conclusions on the part of the investigators. Generally, education studies compare a new method or device in classrooms with the status quo. Of course, the teachers and students know that they’re doing something differently and react to that fact as well as to the actual new method or device.

The “new math” was studied and found to be the great savior of our student mathematical literacy. What happened? When rolled out at scale, it just didn’t work, and a generation of students was hobbled in its mathematics learning by this idea. Suddenly, it was “back to basics” again.

The i3 study requirement is therefore doubly flawed. Studies do not produce reliable black-and-white results. Understanding their data requires very knowledgeable people and often they will conclude only that the new idea may help students. It’s much too easy to bias the study results in the direction that the investigator wishes.

The second flaw in the requirement is the institutional bias that such requirements have against our greatest innovators, small organizations and individuals. The greatest new idea in education could be out there right now seeking acceptance, crying in the wilderness and unheard by the districts, agencies, and foundations. You can be sure that a number of good ideas are struggling to be recognized.

The i3 program also appears to assume that innovation will come from within schools. But schools tend toward inertia. An entire system of school districts, state departments of education, and colleges of education has been built to keep things stable, to avoid change. Good ideas have originated within schools to be sure. However, this approach of the i3 program ignores our greatest resource, entrepreneurship. The program should reward schools that reach out to the entrepreneurial community to find new, exciting, and innovative ways to improve education.

We do not know yet what we’ll see in the final guidelines. However, none of the comment summaries in the Education Week article suggest a movement toward encouraging entrepreneurship. If we’re to make a real difference in education, we must engage all of our resources including the most powerful agent for change we have. While, as an entrepreneur myself, I am biased, I believe that the facts support my conclusions.

Let’s engage all of our national resources in this important effort.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: $650 million, adequate yearly progress, AYP, Department of Education, Education Week, i3, Investing in Innovation Fund, Scale-up grants | Leave a comment »

The Education Budget Crisis: Is Technology the Answer?

Posted on November 11, 2009 by JimS

Across the U.S., colleges and schools are facing unprecedented budget cuts. A web search will erase any doubts that the problem is exaggerated or just a bump in an otherwise smooth road. Here are a few articles that surfaced in a quick search:

Elizabeth McNichol and Nicholas Johnson, “Recession Continues to Batter State Budgets; State Responses Could Slow Recovery,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 20 Oct. 2009
Jack Stripling, “Insult to Injury,” Inside Higher Ed, 2 Nov. 2009
“Are State Budget Cuts Affecting the Quality of Public Higher Education?“, Education-Portal.com, 16 Oct. 2009
“Universities Set to Rally Against Budget Cuts, Pay Cuts, and Tuition Hikes,” Fightbacknews, 9 Nov. 2009
“The Challenge to States: Preserving College Access and Affordability in a Time of Crisis,” The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 10 Mar. 2009
Terence Chea, “Budget Cuts Devastate California Higher Education,” Associated Press/KPBS, 5 Aug. 2009
“Budget Cuts Cripple California’s Universities,” National Student News Service, 19 May 2009.

To encourage discussion on this national (and perhaps international) crisis, ETC is publishing three articles:

The Education Budget Crisis: Is It Necessary? by Jim Shimabukuro
Job Security Is a Powerful Argument Against Change by John Adsit
Tough Decisions for Extraordinary Times by Harry Keller

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

The Education Budget Crisis: Is It Necessary?

Posted on November 10, 2009 by JimS

By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

According to the latest headline, the University of Hawai`i system is facing a $76 million budget crisis that threatens “massive cuts to programs, departments and schools”[1]. Yet, the state recently announced that $203 million has been released to the UH for capital improvements.[2]

The same holds true for the public schools. At a time when budget cuts are forcing layoffs, pay cuts, furloughs, and program reductions, the state is releasing $75 million for — you guessed it — capital improvements.[3]

I’m aware that UH is not alone and that countless colleges and universities around the country are facing similar hard times and budgeting practices. Thus, when I refer to UH specifically, I’m also referring to all the other higher ed institutions that are suffering similar fates.

For me, the fundamental question is, Are physical structures such as classrooms and offices so essential to education that they must take priority over programs and staff? Or put another way, When push comes to shove and we’re forced to choose between the two, do the buildings win?

Perhaps 20 or even 10 years ago, the answer would have been yes. Without campuses and buildings, education would be impossible.

But today, with online programs flourishing, the answer has to be a resounding no. Education is already being delivered online via strategies that don’t require expensive classrooms and offices. In fact, nearly all the physical structures that make up a traditional campus are superfluous for totally online classes. Students and professors can work from anywhere: home, dorm, coffee shop — wherever they have an internet connection.

To its credit, the UH isn’t completely oblivious to the potential of online learning. To address the severe budget cuts, the chancellor has begun a system-wide planning process to prioritize efforts, and under “D. Maximizing resources,” we find “Explore greater use of technology–enhanced learning (distance learning) to increase access to learning opportunities and achieve savings”[4]. The fact that this is last among the six priorities in this category is telling, I think.

The problem, I’ve been told, is the state’s funding process, which treats capital improvements as a separate budget item. Colleges and schools aren’t allowed to reallocate CI funds to other uses. Thus, we face the very real prospect of offering students well-maintained as well as new buildings but severely truncated programs.

But what if . . .

What if the funding process were made more flexible and colleges were given the power to use all or most of the CI funds in innovative ways to save or restore the programs that are now in danger of being cut or curtailed?

If this actually happens, how would we ensure that the funds would be used wisely?

My bias is toward pouring the funds into electronic infrastructure, staff reorganization, and resources that would mazimize a college’s completely online strategies and offerings. In my mind, the money’s there for colleges to thrive, but only if they’re willing to take the leap from physical to primarily virtual structures.

Given the freedom to decide, are colleges ready for this leap? Or would they still opt for capital improvements?

Needless to say, gravity is probably strongest in the middle, where the pull is toward a collegial splitting of the funds between CI and online, But the real danger in this kind of non-decision is that we may simply perpetuate the status quo, watering down the real power of the funds and going through the motions of changing without actually changing and ensuring that the we’ll travel all the way back to where we are now.

__________

1. Dan Nakaso, “University of Hawaii in Crisis Over Deficit,” Honoulu Advertiser, 9 Nov. 2009.

2. “$203M Going to Physical Improvements at UH,” Honoulu Advertiser, 7 Nov. 2009.

3. “Public Schools to Spend $75 Million on Improvements,” KPUA, 5 Nov. 2009.

4. Virginia S. Hinshaw, “Preliminary Recommendations on Prioritization,” University of Hawaii: Communications, 8 Sep. 2009.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: $203M Going to Physical Improvements at UH, and Tuition Hikes, Associated Press, capital improvements, Dan Nakaso, Honoulu Advertiser, KPUA, Pay Cuts, system, University of Hawaii in Crisis Over Deficit, University of Hawai`i, Virginia S. Hinshaw | Leave a comment »

Job Security Is a Powerful Argument Against Change

Posted on November 10, 2009 by JimS

By John Adsit
Editor, Curriculum & Instruction

As I noted in one of my past articles in which I mentioned the problem the computer giant DEC had with creating critical improvements in its computers, the problem lies in the fact that an incumbent system, created to better accommodate an existing situation, acts to perpetuate itself even after the situation changes. That comes about for two reasons.

The first is simple resistance to change, both psychological and legislative. We have always done something one way, and we are used to it. We also have systems, rules, and regulations that have to be changed, and that requires convincing people who are not experts in the change situation that the change is necessary and beneficial. That has already been mentioned, so I hasten along to the second point, the one on which I wish to dwell.

Many people may remember the staggering improvements made decades ago at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, a school with almost complete Hispanic enrollments, with 80% on welfare, which went from the poorest imaginable academic success to unbelievable (to the College Board, at least) academic success in only a couple of years. One small part of that improvement, the efforts of math teacher Jaime Escalante, was depicted in the movie Stand and Deliver. While that movie did a good job depicting Escalante’s work, it failed to show that he was a part of a school-wide revolution, a revolution brought on by earth-shaking changes in the educational process.

One of those changes was instituting a rule that students could not take elective classes if they were below grade level in the key academic areas of reading, writing, and math. As a consequence, the school went from 12 art teachers one year to 2 art teachers the next. That was great for student academic achievement, but it was not so great for the 10 art teachers who lost their jobs. It took a lot of courage for the leadership to override the obvious objections and still make those changes.

I saw the same thing first hand when I was involved with an effort to do something similar, but on a much smaller scale, in a high school. Like almost all schools, such decisions were not made by any one person; they had to be determined by the school’s shared decision making body—in this case the department chair council. All attempts for change proposed by the four key academic departments (English, Math, Social Studies, and Science) had to be approved by the entire council, and those four votes were regularly opposed by the other 17 departments. (Yes, that’s right. Some of the departments represented one teacher or even half a teacher.) Any serious attempt to focus on academic achievement in the core content areas meant a very real threat that we would lose enough jewelry, typing, or vocal music students to cost someone a job. Any proposal that threatened that was a non-starter.

In one whole faculty meeting, an art teacher stood up and said, “I’m against this because it could cost me my job, and if you vote for this, you could be voting to take away my job.” It was the most effective argument anyone made on any side of the issue.

Similarly, when the school board of this very large district considered cutting back on bus transportation, the entire body of employees in the transportation department—a shockingly large number—came out en masse to make sure such a travesty could not be considered.

Whenever any change, such as Jim descries, is considered, we have to remember that a very substantial percentage of people are invested in that status quo, and they will do everything in their power to make sure it is maintained. There are a lot of people whose livelihoods are tied up in capital improvements, and you can be sure they will do whatever they can to keep those funds flowing.

If you want an example, turn on your television today and see how long before you get an urgent appeal from the health care industry trying to make sure that these horrible (to them at least) changes in the health care system are prevented.

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Tough Decisions for Extraordinary Times

Posted on November 10, 2009 by JimS

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

Consider that the board of trustees of a university must be conservative or else that university will not endure. They’re supposed to take the long view and to continue to do things as they have been done for decades or even centuries. Contrast that attitude with corporate America’s narrow focus on next quarter’s results much to our national detriment. Ordinarily, I’d say that the university is making the better decision.

However, these are not ordinary times. For hundreds of years, higher education has, at its root, remained fairly constant. Students live at a university, attend classes given by sages, take tests, and have a social life that they’re unlikely to repeat later in life. The university was intended to be a place apart designed to imbue young adults with certain ideas without the distractions of living in society.

The Internet now threatens that ages-old constant in a manner not previously seen even with the impact of highways, automobiles, radio, and television. Most of us would agree that the hope exists for a better education world based on broadband communication. We are seeing some experimentation with these ideas in universities now but not too much. There’s been lots of paper saving and some bureaucracy trimming. Some institutions now deliver online courses. For example, Troy University located in an out-of-the-way area of Alabama makes most of its income from online courses including a contract with eArmyU.

The online courses are taught by adjunct professors, a nice way to say that they were unappreciated and underpaid. The regular faculty, at least those with which I had contact, obstructed efforts to expand the online program. They were not interested in having that online sideshow invade their hallowed halls. As John Adsit suggests, they are very much wedded to the status quo.

Unless they’d like to end up like the music industry, universities had better make plans and investments today. Higher education is a very large industry with lots of money up for grabs. If established universities drop the ball, there are plenty of organizations ready to pick it up. Jim’s bias toward “electronic infrastructure,” etc. is exactly right. Furthermore, universities should be thinking like some planners in Detroit who are considering demolishing entire neighborhoods outside of the city and converting them back to farmland. As lecture halls and classrooms become disused, how should that space best be utilized? What will higher education look like in twenty years? That’s a short time in the history of many universities.

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Job Security Is a Powerful Argument Against Change

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