Assuming That Teachers Aren’t the Primary Obstacle to Change . . .

Posted on October 21, 2009 by JimS

encounters80Introduction: This encounter began with a comment posted by Lynn Zimmerman to Tom Preskett‘s latest article (“Blackboard Reinforces the Status Quo“). ETC has published variations on this theme in the past, but it seems to be a zimmerman40problem that defies the collective wisdom of educators at all levels. Could it be that we’re barking up the wrong tree? If we assume, for a moment, that teachers aren’t the primary obstacle to change, then who or what is? Why? And what can we do to overcome this obstacle? -Jim S

steve_eskow40Steve Eskow, 21 Oct. 2009, 10:38 am:

I’m trying to recall a period of my professional life when “teacher resistance to change” wasn’t used as the master explanation for the failure to improve education. Education seems almost equally divided between insisters on change and resisters to change.

So: some random, hypertextual questions and thoughts for Lisa, Tom, Lynn–and me.

If an institution dropped an organizing framework like Blackboard or Moodle, and creative instructors used their own knowledge of Web 2.0 or 3.0 to shape their pedagogy, would the students taking five courses have to learn five learning systems?

Education budgets are in shock. Institutions have already moved to drastic economies, including the increasing use of poorly paid adjuncts to do most of the teaching. Will adjuncts using Web 2.0 pedagogies be able to instruct more students, fewer students, the same number?

If an institution using the old organizational structures offers 25 sections of English 101 to Freshman, should those sections teach from a common syllabus, or does each instructor set her own goals and choose her own Web 2.0 pedagogy?

Michael SandelA Harvard prof named Michael Sandel–you’ll find him on YouTube–teaches a course called “Justice” that attracts as many as a thousand students: so many that Harvard has to commandeer its theater building for the course. Apparently the students as well as the prof thinks the course generates “active learning,” despite these numbers. Can a lecture really generate “active learning”? (Sandel is now in the process of putting his course online.)

It’s been said before–by me among others–that it’s more useful to think of the system as eliciting the resistance rather than any one element of the system, like the teacher.

Churchill, you remember, started with the building. “We shape our building,” he said, “and then our buildings shape us.” Lecture halls, classrooms, offices, dorms: those structures resist change at least as insistently as teachers.

When teachers leave the existing system–when campus faculty become part of an all-distance learning initiative, for example–their “resistance to change” often ends.

We need to consider changing our explanations for teacher behavior. And that might require overcoming our own resistance to change.

jims40Jim Shimabukuro, 21 Oct. 2009, 12:49 pm:

Steve Eskow: If an institution dropped an organizing framework like Blackboard or Moodle, and creative instructors used their own knowledge of Web 2.0 or 3.0 to shape their pedagogy, would the students taking five courses have to learn five learning systems?

Good question, Steve. The answer’s yes and no. The underlying issue in online learning seems to be ease of use. On the one hand, CMSs (Course Management Systems) such as Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai are responses to the problem of learning how to move courses online, either fully or partially. The assumption is that an integrated system, or a CMS, is the best method. It’s the Swiss Army knife approach, the all-in-one. Learn one system, and you have all the functions that you’ll need to teach and learn online.

The problem with this all-in-one approach is that users are locked in to a limited set of features. If we compare teaching to building a house, then a CMS is a closed construction system that provides basic tools and materials. The instructor, as carpenter, quickly discovers the limits of her/his tools and resources. After a while, it’s obvious that the house can take on only a limited number of shapes — and it ends up as a little box in a virtual landscape of boxes that all look just the same.

Teachers are, if anything, fiercely independent. They want to own their courses, and they do so by selecting their own required textbooks and resources and developing their own syllabi and learning activities. They demand the freedom to set up their own schedules, assignments, learning activities, and grading systems. They often demand a specific room in a specific time slot. This is what makes teaching an art and so personally fulfilling. The CMSs, for all their purported simplicity, run counter to this independent spirit.

On the other hand, a completely open system such as Web 2.0 is, at least for the novice, bewildering. Where to begin to build a course? How? In comparison, a CMS is a haven of order and simplicity.

From the perspective of an administrator, a CMS is a simple and logical way to move classes online. The alternative is, apparently, chaos.

But is this true?

I’d argue that it’s not. A quick exploration will reveal that all the functions available in a CMS are also available on the web. The difference is that they are not roofed under a single CMS. In a very real sense, the world’s largest, most flexible, most open, and most powerful CMS is the web itself. Instead of just one format for discussions, you have scores; instead of just one format for submitting or presenting papers and projects, you have countless; instead of just a handful of ways to present course material, you have a nearly infinite number.

The point is that once you’ve seen what’s available in the world’s market place, there’s no going back to the single store in your neighborhood.

From the perspective of IT folks who are assigned the task of guiding neophytes into the brave new e-world, the prospect of putting all their effort into a single closed system versus a nearly infinite variety in an open system is very attractive.

But looked at another way, this one-answer approach is shortsighted and ultimately noneducative. If learning is empowering, then this approach stifles learning. In the end, you have instructors and students using a very limited subset of what the web has to offer, and the transfer of learning from the single CMS to the worldwide web is nil. The web remains a scary, chaotic place, and the users are back at square one when it comes to web proficiency.

Returning to your question, Steve: Yes, the students taking five online classes in a web-wide or open CMS (OCMS) would have to learn five different OCMSs. But the critical difference is that all of the parts of the different OCMSs are on the web and the student will quickly learn how to categorize and use them. It’s like getting your bearings in a strange city or highway system. You learn that they all have the same features, and it’s just a matter of adapting to slight variations.

In the end, the student and teachers learn to be at home on the web rather than in the limited confines of a single, closed CMS (CCMS). It’s the difference between being at home in the world and being at home in your neighborhood. Opportunities for creativity and development are unlimited. The outcome is empowerment of the student and the teacher.

Are there problems in guiding faculty in the use of this open approach? There are, but they are far from being insurmountable. In fact, the process can be quite simple. It’s the same ones we use to teach general skills that need to be applied in different ways for different settings. But that’s for another discussion.

Are there other problems, such as security? Yes, of course, but, again, solutions aren’t all that difficult to develop.

When it comes to technology, freedom of choice is a critical factor. Examples abound. All we need to do is look at our choices of cars, cell phones, entertainment, travel, computers, software, etc. The movement is always toward more options than less. We can expect no less in education, in teaching and learning.

Steve, I was planning to respond to some of your other points, but I’ll need to do that some other time.

bbracey40Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 21 Oct. 2009, 12:55 pm:

I enjoyed the GAID Global Forum in Monterrey, Mexico, because every time a person blamed it on teachers. I queried:

Who decides what the curriculum is that teachers use and what flexibility is there in your system?

Who creates the infrastructure for teaching and learning in digital ways and what is the way, the method of teacher professional development?

Is it like a vaccinatioin — one shot and that’s it, or is it sustained and supported?

Access to information: Is it there? What speeds are there? So many teachers don’t have broadband at home.

What access do teachers have (in the US, too) to broadband and the rich resources on the web? Do they have it in school and at home?

What time is allowed to update practice and to learn new media?

GAID2009

The professors from Latin America were saying that the computer should not replace the teacher. I asked how would that be possible or do you mean you have a problem with elearning initiatives while you are being webcast? Why one technology and not the other?

Infrastructure, content, community of practice and support, sustained support for devices and programs, use of tools like T Pack, understanding of Bloom’s taxonomy, digital understanding of cyberbullying and resources — who makes these decisions and are they known?

There is a lot more. What really gets my goat is that other people tell us how to teach and then when it does not work we get the blame. For example, the last 8 years of no science and all of the groups that have gone to Washington complaining about it.

Ms. Spelling killed the teaching of science with NCLB. Example: the teachers in Washington, DC, following the practices that DC accepted have now been weighed by Ms Rhee and found wanting. So who is to blame when schools don’t have a website or teachers don’t have email. Hello?

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 21 Oct. 2009, 1:08 pm:

Great questions. I even get bewildered from time to time with so much on my plate. I was single and so time was not a problem. These days I don’t have the time, though I am an eager advocate of what works. Some things are not to my liking, but in a K-12 school system we usually don’t get to make those kinds of decisions.

Some informed practice requires teacher involvement, reflection, and understanding. Everyone tells me teachers can’t program. That is not true, but programing takes an investment of time and support.

Here is an interesting take from an Edutopia Blog: “Let’s Get Real About Innovation in Our Schools,” by Suzie Boss 10/12/09.

Steve Eskow, 21 Oct. 2009, 1:40 pm:

I have to brood some about your provocative comments, Jim.

One question occurs immediately.

Does your thinking about LMS’s and free choice square with your picking a particular blogging program for us to use? I, for one, with my limitations, find much to dislike with the program: I don’t like how it handles replies, and that it doesn’t automatically notify me via email when someone replies to a piece of mine.

Isn’t WordPress exactly the kind of system you criticize?

On the other hand. . .and there’s always another hand:

The system is professional, tested, flexible. . .and allows you and the rest of us to concentrate on ideas rather than systems and technology.

Jim Shimabukuro, 21 Oct. 2009, 2:28 pm:

Steve Eskow: Does your thinking about LMS’s and free choice square with your picking a particular blogging program for us to use? I, for one, with my limitations, find much to dislike with the program: I don’t like how it handles replies, and that it doesn’t automatically notify me via email when someone replies to a piece of mine. Isn’t WordPress exactly the kind of system you criticize?

Good question, Steve. Yes, I think my choice of WordPress (WP) for ETC fits with my views on using the web as an open CMS. ETC uses WP as part of the web — not part of a closed CMS. WP, as used by ETC, is available and accessible to everyone. Anyone can use it to set up a blog for an endless number of purposes. Use it in ETC and become proficient, and the tool is also yours to use for your own purposes. Transfer of learning? Yes, definitely. And it’s free.

I explored four different blogs before deciding on WP. Two were part of packaged systems, a social network (Ning) and a closed CMS (Sakai). The fourth was freely available on the web, Blogger, which is easier to use but not as stable or powerful as WP.

There are other blog programs, but for me, it came down to Blogger and WP. I chose the latter. If there are better open web, free blog platforms, I’d like to explore them.

Is it perfect? Definitely not. But improvements keep coming, and in time, it ought to address many of its shortcomings.

WP doesn’t have the feature you want — email notification of a reply or post — but it probably will someday.

We could shift ETC into the Ning social network (SN), and that would give us the feature you want, I think. I’m not sure how powerful Ning’s blog is. My first impression wasn’t very good. Or we could pour ETC into a Ning discussion forum setup to get the feature you want. But in my mind, we win a battle but lose the war. There are so many more advantages to ETC in the WP environment than in Ning.

This is not to say that WP doesn’t need to beef up its discussion features. It does. But my guess is that WP isn’t fully aware of the potential of discussion in blogs. In time, though, hopefully it’ll learn and turn the discussion feature into a powerful tool that surpasses that found in Ning.

WP’s discussion feature is on a par with most open web blogs that feature posts by selected writers. If a reader comments on an article, he/she doesn’t usually receive notification of comments from other writers. This notification feature seems to be standard for SNs, but not for blogs. But this could change.

I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question, Steve, but if I haven’t, please let me know.

keller40Harry Keller, 21 Oct. 2009, 2:48 pm: In public schools in this country, teachers are the problem and the solution. Because so many classroom decisions are left to the teachers, they can stymie reform and innovation. These days they are underpaid and overworked. When your school sits in a difficult neighborhood and your class size has ballooned, you are a miracle worker if you can have any learning take place. It’s not particularly surprising that they resist new ideas. Besides, many new things get funded for just a year or two. The teachers put in the time to learn about these things and then find that they’ve wasted their time when they disappear.

Teachers are the solution for plenty of reasons that I don’t have time to explore now.

I’m getting ready for CSTA (California Science Teachers Association) and have lots more to do before I leave.

CSTA2009


claude40Claude Almansi, 23 Oct. 2009 12:05 am:

[Steve Eskow, 21 Oct. 2009, 10:38 PM:] If an institution dropped an organizing framework like Blackboard or Moodle, and creative instructors used their own knowledge of Web 2.0 or 3.0 to shape their pedagogy, would the students taking five courses have to learn five learning systems?

[James N Shimabukuro, 22 Oct. 2009, 12:49 AM:] Returning to your question, Steve: Yes, the students taking five online classes in a web-wide or open CMS (OCMS) would have to learn five different OCMSs. But the critical difference is that all of the parts of the different OCMSs are on the web and the student will quickly learn how to categorize and use them. It’s like getting your bearings in a strange city or highway system. You learn that they all have the same features, and it’s just a matter of adapting to slight variations.

Personal experience: in 2007 Università della Svizzera Italiana foresaw an “intensive French module” for their Master course in Intercultural communication, but they have re-used the same URL for the 2008-10 course), to be given in French and English. I was put in charge of this module (which took place Apr. 16-20) rather late, and with indications about number of participants varying from 3 to 15 until the day before it began. Actually, there were four participants, all already inserted in professional life.

When I asked for access to the Master’s Moodle CMS to store info so that students could concentrate on oral activities without having to take notes all the time, the organizers told me I couldn’t because training in the use of the CMS was only foreseen for after the language modules. I thought it was odd to have to train folks in using (managing maybe, but using?) Moodle, but there was no time to argue, so I made a wiki instead (click here to see what it looked like when we started).

When I showed the wiki to the students, their first reaction was, “Why not the Moodle CMS?” I explained, they raised their eyes to the ceiling, then went at the wiki. None of them had ever actively used one before, but it took them under 5 minutes to get the hang of this one. They liked the idea of not having to take notes all the time, particularly the two (a grand 50%) who had broken their writing arm.

I guess nowadays, a new web app is no problem either for younger students who grew up with Web 2.0 things that are all similar due to their XML basis – see Michael Wesch’s classic video “Web 2.0 . . . The Machine is Us/ing Us” (1).

[Steve Eskow, 22 Oct. 2009, 1:40 AM:] I have to brood some about your provocative comments, Jim. One question occurs immediately. Does your thinking about LMS’s and free choice square with your picking a particular blogging program for us to use? I, for one, with my limitations, find much to dislike with the program: I don’t like how it handles replies, and that it doesn’t automatically notify me via email when someone replies to a piece of mine.

(en passant: apart from the RSS solutions I mentioned in the thread about notifications, another work around is to make a comment yourself and check the box for “Notify me of follow-up comments via email.”)

Isn’t WordPress exactly the kind of system you criticize? On the other hand . . . and there’s always another hand: The system is professional, tested, flexible . . . and allows you and the rest of us to concentrate on ideas rather than systems and technology.

Blogs can be used as LMS, but wikis – which nowadays are just as easy to use – are definitely more adapted, because they don’t have the linear constrictions of blogs (2). Moreover, wikis keep the history of changes, so if you or a student bungle/s, you can always revert to the former version – most free wiki platforms enable download as a zipped file in 3 clicks of the latest version of the whole thing, some even of all the history. Fewer bloging platforms offer this possibility.

__________

(1) If you’re already using intranets in your work: re “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video (also see the thread in this list about folks annotating stuff “on” one’s page with tools like Sidewiki and Diigo): there are several Diigo annotations on the video page, collectible in 2 clicks – including one by Wesch himself about adding the video to Mojiti (where the video actually disappeared under several layers of comments, which you could fortunately disable if you wanted to see the video).

(2) These linear constrictions can be bypassed: in 2005, I made a mirror of a Tunisian Human Rights site that was being blocked by censorship in Tunisia, in a blogger.com blog: I made a “table of content” entry I dated something like 2100 so that it’d stay on top, then linked in it to the other entries where I copied the pages of the site. But a blog is short for web log, and logs are intrinsically linear, because they are time-based, like diaries. Wikis *offer the possibility* of a time-based reading, through the history feature, but they don’t impose it.

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Patterns in the Design of Ed Media: An Interview with Christian Kohls

Posted on October 15, 2009 by JimS

Stefanie PankeBy Stefanie Panke
Editor, Social Software in Education

Christian Kohls is a software developer, community manager, and e-learning researcher. Since August 2009, he has worked for SMART Technologies, the international producer of interactive whiteboards. Prior to his current position, he worked at the Knowledge Media Research Center, where we had been colleagues for many years. Christian’s main research foci are patterns for interactive graphics and educational media. In March 2009, he organized an international workshop on e-learning patterns.

He has recently won the best paper award at the E-Learning 2009, the largest conference on e-learning in the German speaking areas. Another indicator of his distinctive contribution to the field of patterns in instructional design is the so called “Shepherding Award” that he received at this years’ EuroPLoP conference in Irsee, for his effort as a conference reviewer.

Christian Kohls

SP: Christian, can you explain what patterns are and what impact they have on designing educational media?

CK: Patterns capture experience about forms of good design or successful practices. Experts have a whole bunch of patterns in their mind, and they apply them in the course of designing media or lesson activities. Somebody who “knows how to do it” knows the right patterns. There is no reason for hype – it’s all about craftsmanship and sharing practical knowledge. And that’s why patterns are important to the design of educational media. Would you go to a doctor who invents a new treatment every time instead of using tried and tested practices? The same is true for educational media: Instructional designers have the professional knowledge to address standard problems. Patterns are an effective way of sharing and communicating this knowledge for two reasons:

  1. First, the pattern format offers a specific reflection on forms or practices. A pattern description reasons about why an established solution is a good solution to recurrent problems and in which context it is applicable. The fit between a solution and the context of a problem is very important and offers a holistic view. A pattern explicitly tells us which forces have influenced the design decisions. In each pattern description you will find context information, a problem statement, a discussion of forces, and the description of a tested solution that resolves these forces.
  2. The second reason that makes patterns useful is their medium level of abstraction. A pattern is neither too abstract nor too concrete. It generalizes enough to reduce the complexity of things a designer needs to know. Only an abstracted form spans a design space which lets the designer adapt to specific needs of a new situation. However, there are limits to the process of abstraction. A pattern that is too abstract loses its “gestalt” and does not provide enough instructions for practical implementation.

SP: When did you first develop an interest in patterns?

CK: I encountered software design patterns when I studied computer science – and I was right into it. The now famous book Design Patterns – Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software may have been the most important book for my professional career as a software developer. It addresses a lot of problems that I stumbled into when I tried to design larger architectures. Large architectures soon become very complex, and I lacked the experience of how to deal with such systems. Design patterns gave me answers from experts. Not only did this help me to solve the problems I was aware of but it also uncovered that there were problems I had previously ignored. Design patterns allowed me to understand the problems and become an expert myself. There is a difference between knowing and understanding a problem. Once you understand the problem you can really see how and why the given solutions work.

_______________________________

Many multimedia applications use interactive elements. Can you always tell why the designer has chosen the specific form of interaction? No? Well, me neither. Interactivity should be a means to an end, but very often you get the impression that it is used as an end in itself or to make the product “cool.”

_______________________________

Over time my work focus shifted more and more to the field of education. If you are trained in thinking analytically about computation and programming, all the literature on instructional design, online pedagogy, and learning theory feels like a maze. I was collecting educational patterns in my very own interest: I wanted to learn how to produce and author educational media that have real instructional value. What I found was that very often pedagogical models were too abstract for beginners – that is, they did not tell me what to do practically. On the other hand, I found many case studies and reports that were way too extensive for my purpose. They described a lot of details irrelevant to me. Or, more exactly, as a beginner it’s hard to judge what matters or not when you can’t see the woods for the trees. I felt the need for a structured approach to reflect on the reasons for choosing a specific educational practice. For example, many multimedia applications use interactive elements. Can you always tell why the designer has chosen the specific form of interaction? No? Well, me neither. Interactivity should be a means to an end, but very often you get the impression that it is used as an end in itself or to make the product “cool.” I am interested in what benefits a specific form of interaction offers so I can decide when to use it and when to avoid it. That is why I started writing my own educational patterns about the effective use of interactive graphics. And that’s also when I got in touch with the pattern community for the first time.

SP: What is so special about this particular community?

CK: The pattern community is a great example of a community of practice that really works. Many great books and products are owed to that community. For example, the first Wiki by Ward Cunningham was designed to collaboratively write and share patterns. I think we have a certain spirit in the community: There is a culture of giving and sharing and, yes, we want to make this world a better place. This might sound funny. But seriously, if you create educational media that help people to learn more effectively or to better understand the topic, you have improved the world a little. Patterns are about solving problems – and that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The amazing thing about the pattern community is that it is not only about idealism but about practical work. We reflect a lot about design and then we write down which forms have worked for what reasons. We give this knowledge to the public as a gift. And we get a lot back from other people who are sharing their own experiences. I think gift culture and our common goal to further good design practice is what drives this community.

SP: Can you summarize your personal lessons learned from attending the PLoP conferences?

CK: We use a special format at PLoP conferences, the Writer’s Workshops. In that workshop you are not presenting your paper but other participants are discussing your paper. They point out what they liked and give a lot of suggestions for improvement. I have never experienced a better feedback culture than in PLoPs. In fact, I have learned to give more constructive feedback since I attend PLoP conferences. You will find that even the best paper can be improved, and you will find that even the worst submission has some parts to be praised. And the same is true for every product in the world. You

_______________________________

But not everything that is labeled a pattern really is a good pattern. What we need is to establish quality standards, and I think we can learn a lot from qualitative research methods.

_______________________________

may have noticed that I am fully convinced of patterns. But not everything that is labeled a pattern really is a good pattern. What we need is to establish quality standards, and I think we can learn a lot from qualitative research methods. From my point of view, patterns are theories about good practices, which means we can develop academic standards for pattern mining, pattern writing, and pattern evaluation. Many other members of the community were interested in this idea, and I had some very good discussions. But I have learned that I need to package my scientific reasoning more practically. What we need are patterns to judge the quality of patterns!

SP: Can you name some patterns every instructional designer should know?

CK: I am afraid that we still don’t have one tried and true set of patterns that apply to the wide world of instructional design. This definitely is a task for the community in the next few years. Fortunately, the number of people who write educational patterns is growing. We had workshops on pedagogical patterns on the last EuroPLoPs, the European branch of the community. A good starting point is the pedagogical pattern project which has collected patterns for more than 10 years now. The more recent patterns are found at the EuroPLoP conference web pages.

SP: If somebody is interested in the approach, what is a good starting point to learn more or even get involved in the pattern community?

CK: The best starting point is the website of the Hillside Group. They organize all the PLoPs and offer general information about patterns. Though most of the content is about software patterns, visitors will find many definitions and introductions. If you look for starting points about educational patterns, check out the pattern language network.

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Sloan-C’s Virtual Attendance Option: Real or an Afterthought?

Posted on October 15, 2009 by JimS

encountersIntroduction: The 15th annual Sloan-C Conference on Online Learning will be adding a new virtual attendance option to its October 28-30 event in Orlando, Florida. Hmmm. Will this online “addition” be anything to write home about? Or is it just an afterthought, a pale reflection of the “real” conference? -Jim S

John SenerJohn Sener, ETC writer, on 15 Oct. 2009, 3:54 am:

Sloan-C’s virtual conference option at its San Fran event in June was very well received by its participants. It’s certainly not intended as an afterthought; Sloan-C is very consciously and deliberately moving into this space of virtual conferences, which is driven in part by the high cost of travel and the budget crunch.

Whether or not it’s a pale reflection of the “real” conference depends on one’s perspective about virtual vs. f2f events, I suppose. Recently I’ve been hearing ads by British Airways touting the necessity of f2f contact to conduct business effectively. I interpret that as meaning that virtual meetings must be starting to cut into their business if they feel the need to counterattack the trend in their ads…

claude40Claude Almansi, ETC editor, accessibility issues and site accessibility facilitator, on 15 Oct. 2009, 5:08 am:

I agree with John Sener. Based on participating in 2 virtual conferences recently:

1. Oct. 3: about digital natives, both real-life in Lugano and online.

positive: brilliant moderator for the online part, quick in accepting chat messages, good at drawing speakers’ attention to them (they were all a bit too old and above all set in their ways to know how to multitask between their in-presence do and reading the chat)

negative: the do was only transmitted in streaming video, and at too high a definition, meaning that the moderator kept sending messages: “If the streaming stops, reload the page.”

2. today: work meeting between folks in Lugano, Luzern, Zurich, Brig and Geneva. Real virtual conference, say like Elluminate but as Web app, so no java applets to install.

positive: again, the moderator was good (though there was no connection to be made with a real-life meeting as there was none, and we were all used to video conference softwares, so her job was easier)

positive: the software allowed folks to indicate their connection type (hence speed), and actually everybody used just written chat and audio (not video)

positive: nice whiteboard for slides etc: much better than having them filmed onscreen in a video streaming

negatives: none

So based on these 2 recent experiences (and some older ones) I’d say that when offering an interactive conference both in real life and on the web, success depends on

  • having a separate moderator for the online part
  • using a real online conferencing software rather than just video-streaming the live event + a text chat.

thompson40John Thompson, ETC editor, green computing, on 15 Oct. 2009, 5:12 am:

A growing number of heretofore F2F ed tech conferences (e.g., TCEA, FETC) are now including a virtual attendance component. I suppose it provides another way to reach out to the ed tech community, and perhaps can be seen as a marketing tool, especially when the virtual conference is free. It also attracts attendees who might not otherwise have participated and provides another revenue stream for conferences, many of which are seeing the effects of the strained economy.

Having F2F conferences offer a virtual choice is similar to print media also offering an online edition. And there you’re seeing a gradual shift to online editions being more like the print edition, not “pale” versions. USA Today has recently initiated a free electronic edition for subscribers that is exactly like the print edition, plus add a reduced size Saturday electronic edition to subscribers. The NY Times and Chronicle of Higher Education are two other print pubs that now offer electronic versions to subscribers that are exactly like the print editions.

Interesting to see Sloan-C charging a registration fee for its virtual component, albeit at a significantly reduced level from the F2F conference registration fee. These are changing times for long time institutions such as print pubs and F2F conferences, and those times are exacerbated by the current difficult economic situation. At the very least, Sloan-C needs to be congratulated for taking the initiative.

Disclaimer – I’m presenting at the Sloan-C conference this month.

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Blackboard Reinforces the Status Quo

Posted on October 13, 2009 by JimS

Tom PreskettBy Tom Preskett

According to Lisa M. Lane, in “Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching” (First Monday, 5 Oct. 2009):

Course management systems (CMSs), used throughout colleges and universities for presenting online or technology-enhanced classes, are not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. They influence pedagogy by presenting default formats designed to guide the instructor toward creating a course in a certain way. This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT) . . . . Blackboard “tends to encourage a linear pathway through the content,” and its default is to support easy uploading and text entry to achieve that goal.

I’ve always approached this from the opposite angle and said that VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) are designed for the current education market rather than to improve or change practice in any way. So it’s file repositories and grading books all the way. Remember, unlike Web 2.0, many of these VLEs are commercial products and, in business, you give the customers what they want, and customers don’t want their pedagogy challenged. You also have to remember that a lot of the collaborative tools have been added on as VLEs react to what is going on out in the real world. But when they are add-ons they don’t really impact the intrinsic design or structure. They could redesign as new versions, but they don’t. Certainly, each “new” version of Blackboard is so simliar to the last that it’s almost indistinguishable. Maybe the consistency is important to them, but it’s a real missed opportunity. By the way, I’m quoting Lisa’s use of CMS, but I use LMS (Learning Management System) and VLE. I steer clear of CMS because it can get mixed up with Content Management System.

A CMS must be designed around a central pedagogy: consistency of interface relies on consistency of approach. It is only important to recognize that the interface of any software reflects its intent.

I’d not thought about it in these terms before. Although I agree with this, I’m not sure that Blackboard is designed with any particular pedagogy in mind. I think it’s more a case of designing around the prevailing perception of what teaching is. Moodle is deliberately different. The collaborative tools are much more prominent, and the grading system is rubbish, probably deliberately so.

Lisa then characterises most educators as “web novices.” She says:

These users were trying to reduce their cognitive load by limiting their use of the software, while Web experts were able to keep their goal in mind easily while searching more deeply.

And:

When faced with a different interface or online environment, novices are inclined to utilize only the aspects they understand from a non-Web context.

It’s a double-whammy. First, you have a majority whose personal ICT (Information and Communication Technology) skills don’t allow them to easily explore and experiment with the full range of what a VLE has to offer. Second, you have a majority who are content, if not happy, with the prevailing pedagogy of current teaching. Thus, there is no desire or compulsion to embrace, explore, or experiment with software that challenges this. I also feel the knowledge of pedagogy within education is pretty limited, but I don’t base this on any hard facts. Anyway, both these issues are massive barriers to the adoption and use of Web 2.0 type tools . If you’ve read my articles in ETC and my blog, then you’ll know how sad that makes me.

More attacks on the Blackboard functionality:

Most professors think in terms of the semester, and how their pedagogical goals can be achieved within the context of time, rather than space . . . . Blackboard’s default organization accepts neither of these approaches in its initial interface.

You can, of course, change this, which is what I often advise my academics to do. But why have it like this? What it does validate and reinforce is the notion that content, course news, and grading is all the VLE is good for. It’s not for teaching or learning, but to retrieve information. It’s a passive rather than active relationship, Web 1.0 not Web 2.0.

She continues:

There is more satisfaction in mastering a few elements than in experimenting. Instructors move very slowly into features of the CMS that support less-instructivist models, and experience with the CMS over time does not necessarily lead to more creative pedagogy, or even to more expanive use of system features.

So we have a situation where educators struggle to get to grips with what a VLE can do AND they don’t really want to anyway. That’s not good.

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Investing in Innovation Fund: Criteria May Be a Barrier to Some Innovators

Posted on October 11, 2009 by JimS

Harry KellerBy Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

Arne Duncan, the new Secretary of Education and much-praised previous superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, is applying $650 million of his ARRA (federal stimulus) money to a new initiative: Investing in Innovation Fund (i3). At first glance, this program is bold and should bring some much-needed innovation to education, at least in part through education technology and change.

As with any such program, the details will make all the difference. The rules for the i3 program are going out for comment and have already been released in preliminary form. Their thrust is commendable. The rules require that all proposals come from LEAs (essentially school districts), non-profits affiliated with LEAs, or consortia of schools.

Arne DuncanThe program lists four “absolute” priorities. Your proposal only has to meet one of these. In short, they are teacher quality, data use, standards and assessments, and low-performing schools. The program goes on to list four more “competitive” preferences: early childhood programs, college access, disabilities and limited English proficiency, and rural schools. Addressing competitive priorities will gain evaluation points.

The program will provide grants in three categories: scale-up grants, validation grants, and development grants. The size of the grants runs from high to low across these three as does the requirement for evidence for effectiveness of the proposal, which includes research on, significance of, and magnitude of the effect.

All those interested in innovation in education in the United States should be prepared to comment on this major initiative. I see a major weakness of the program as the dependence on experimental studies for deciding which proposals to fund. Perhaps, few alternatives present themselves. Still, I have read a number of studies that purported to prove opposite conclusions. I cannot imagine the equivalent of a double-blind study in education because the instructor and students know that they’re doing something different, and change affects performance.

Then, there’s the expectations. Expecting better results generally creates better results in these studies.

Here’s one definition of “strong evidence” from the draft of the program: “one large, well-designed and well-implemented randomized controlled, multisite trial that supports the effectiveness of the practice, strategy, or program.” This definition leads to the question of who can afford to conduct such a trial?  So, are only wealthy purveyors of education innovation eligible for this sort of grant?  Will the “usual suspects” garner all or nearly all of this federal largesse?

Looking at the criteria for the three grant types yields some interesting information.

Table of criteria for i3 grants

Even if you’re ready to scale to national level, you must have “strong evidence” before doing so. What is “national level” anyway? The draft program requests estimates of costs for reaching 100,000, 250,000, and 500,000 students for validation and development grants. It requests estimates for 100,000, 500,000, and 1,000,000 students for the scale-up grants. Does that mean that national scale is just double regional scale?

As a small business operator, I find myself in a difficult position in the education marketplace, and this program simply underlines my situation. I cannot afford to conduct large studies of my effectiveness. Yet, without such expensive studies, I have trouble attracting enough business or investment to conduct such studies. So, at this time, I have to rely on anecdotal evidence including quite a few enthusiastic testimonials.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that my business has a truly transformative innovation. I can certainly say that it’s new, unique, and exciting without running studies, but let’s assume that such studies would prove the case for my service. The publicity benefits of receiving validation from the Department of Education in the form of one of these grants to a school district for the use of my service would be huge. If my assumption for the sake of argument were true, then schools across the country would reap large benefits too. Yet, I see no clear path to such a result.

I believe that my situation is not unique. Others must have excellent innovations ready to be deployed more widely and are facing numerous obstacles in doing so. Can this government program be amended to provide the opportunity for such innovations to be recognized?  If so, how?

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Encounter: Sidewiki – Handy Tool or Destructive Weapon?

Posted on October 10, 2009 by JimS

encountersIntroduction: This encounter begins with an idea, a “bump,” from Harry Keller, which first appeared in an etcnews-l listserv post on 8 Oct. 2009. To participate in this encounter, post a comment. I’ll append most or all of the comments to this post as they’re published. -js

Harry Keller

Harry Keller, editor, science education, on 8 Oct. 2009, 9:26AM: Has anyone seen Google’s Sidewiki feature?  It’s pretty scary if you begin to think about it as this blogger [Paul Myers, TalkBiz News: The Blog] has in “Google Steals the Web.” Can any of you calm my trepidation regarding this potentially serious problem?

Claude Almansi Claude Almansi, editor, accessibility issues, and ETC site accessibility facilitator, on 8 Oct. 2009, 11:28 pm: Errh, Jim and Harry, am I missing something in this very long and detailed article? In what is Sidewiki new? The same commenting feature is offered by Diigo bookmarking, and Diigo has been around since 2006.

I used Diigo comments on Myer’s article: they all can be viewed by clicking here, even by people who don’t have a Diigo account, as I made them public, whereas only people who have installed Sidewiki on their Google bar can see the Sidewiki comments, according to that article. And people who install a browsing feature on a toolbar should be aware of what it does. I have twittered my bookmark, and I could have my Diigo bookmarks – and thus my public comments – showing on my Facebook page. And I’m not sure Diigo has the filtering-through-algorithms capacity Google Sidewiki has, however imperfect that might be.

So in what way is Google Sidewiki worse than Diigo comments? When I mentioned having added Diigo comments to the e-codices electronic version of Historia destructionis Troiae, the person in charge of the e-codices project did not get his knickers in a twist over my “stealing his content” or “hijacking his server.” He wrote that he had actually been trying to implement something like that for users to comment, just that the Diigo commenting solution was not user-friendly on pictures (true, it works better on text). Maybe he took it serenely because, being a tech person, he really understood how these commenting web apps work. Which apparently the author of the article only does partially.

These social commenting features can be fabulous for learning projects involving several schools, for instance. With Diigo, at least, you can choose to share your bookmarks or individual comments with a group, and Diigo has keyboard shortcuts that make it accessible to the blind. Teachers wishing to do the same with Sidewiki should check if there are the same shortcuts. I’m not going to install the needed toolbar as I already have the Diigo and Webdeveloper ones (not that I am a web developer, but it is very useful to get concrete evidence of why a site makes you queasy).

Harry Keller (10.9.09, 4:17AM): I have never seen Diigo before and hadn’t heard of Sidewiki before reading the article and have never used it. Given those caveats, here’s my take.

For the crowd that has Google toolbar, a huge number of people, they will be asked to add Sidewiki. The pitch will be seductive: social commenting. Sounds great. Most will do so. I’d expect millions of Sidewiki users in short order.

If I don’t have Sidewiki, then comments about my site will be invisible to me. However, any member who arrives at my site will see them all right there along with my intended site. In other words, they don’t have to go to Sidewiki.com to view the comments. They only have to go to smartscience.net, possibly as the result of a Google search. The right portion of my site will be cut off to make room for the Sidewiki, which will not be cut off at all. Those comments will be more prominent than my site. Whenever I send out http://www.smartscience.net to anyone, the possibility exists that they will see any comments. Those comments can be from anyone, including competitors.

It would be very easy for a competitor to use newly created and fake Gmail account to leave false comments about my service on the site. Then, every Sidewiki user who uses my site would see the negative comment and would probably believe it. Sidewiki users might see the comment and repeat it on various other social networks. I would have no recourse except to complain to Google, who could take their time reviewing the complaint and even decide to leave it alone. However, in a very sinister twist, I wouldn’t even know about the sabotage unless I join Sidewiki.

So, the problem has two parts. The first part is that your own URL would deliver Sidewiki, not some other Google-owned URL. The second part is the ease with which those who would do you grief can sabotage your Sidewiki “enhanced” site without your knowledge.

John AdsitJohn Adsit, editor, curriculum & instruction, K-12, on 9 Oct. 2009, 4:42AM: I share Harry’s concern, with a sense of real despair.

Let’s say Google comes to its senses and decides not to do it.

So what? If it can be done, someone will do it. Perhaps the solution is to get Google and other organizations with decent reputations to shun that technology leave it to some organization so unscrupulous that anything that appears in it will have no credibility to the average viewer, who will see it as a nuisance rather than a valuable asset.

Claude Almansi (10.9.09, 5:45AM):

[Harry Keller:] I have never seen Diigo before and hadn’t heard of Sidewiki before reading the article and have never used it. Given those caveats, here’s my take.

For the crowd that has Google toolbar, a huge number of people, they will be asked to add Sidewiki. The pitch will be seductive: social commenting. Sounds great. Most will do so. I’d expect millions of Sidewiki users in short order.

If I don’t have Sidewiki, then comments about my site will be invisible to me. However, any member who arrives at my site will see them all right there along with my intended site. In other words, they don’t have to go to Sidewiki.com to view the comments. They only have to go to smartscience.net, possibly as the result of a Google search. The right portion of my site will be cut off to make room for the Sidewiki, which will not be cut off at all. Those comments will be more prominent than my site. Whenever I send out http://www.smartscience.net to anyone, the possibility exists that they will see any comments. Those comments can be from anyone, including competitors.

It would be very easy for a competitor to use newly created and fake Gmail account to leave false comments about my service on the site.

Same with Diigo.

Then, every  Sidewiki user who uses my site would see the negative comment and would probably believe it.

If they are Sidewiki users themselves – and they have to be in order to view the comments – they’ll be able to tell the difference between web page and comments.

Sidewiki users might see the comment and repeat it on various other social networks.

From what I understood, you can only share your own Sidewiki comments to other social networks.

I would have no recourse except to complain to Google, who could take their time reviewing the complaint and even decide to leave it alone. However, in a very sinister twist, I wouldn’t even know about the sabotage unless I join Sidewiki.

Same with Diigo sticky notes: you don’t see them unless you are signed into your Diigo account.

So, the problem has two parts. The first part is that your own URL would deliver Sidewiki, not some other Google-owned URL. The second part is the ease with which those who would do you grief can sabotage your Sidewiki “enhanced” site without your knowledge.

Sorry if I was not clear: you can view Diigo sticky notes in the Diigo bookmarking page, AND you can also view them on the site they have been made at, just like Sidewiki comments. For example, click here (from <http://lenovosocial.com/discover/social-site-reviews/diigo/&gt;). They are actually far more invasive than Sidewiki, which stays put in a column on the left of the commented page.

So the Diigo sticky notes present exactly the same potential risks as the Google Sidewiki comments. With the added risk that they are more invasive and can be collected by people who don’t have a Diigo account on the bookmarking page as well. I made 37 frigging Diigo sticky notes on the article you sent, btw.

In nuce: the only way to prevent folks from commenting what you write is not to publish it: whether the authors liked it or not, people wrote comments directly on medieval manuscripts, on printed books, now they do on websites too.

BTW, before Diigo and Sidewiki, there was – still is – Gabbly, which allows you to add a chat to any web page by adding “gabbly.com/” in front of any URL – for instance <http://gabbly.com/etcjournal.wordpress.com/&gt;. Click here for an example.

That could be annoying, too, couldn’t it? I remember joking with a friend about creating such a gabbly chat to promote The Pirate Bay on the site of MPAA or RIAA. And I did that one without registering at gabbly. If you register, you can make money from ads as well. Gabbly has been around for years, and so far as I know there have not been any protests about it.

Claude Almansi (10.9.09, 6:16AM): John, from a search about Gabbly, I got to Gooey, which is apparently the mother of all these applications that allow you to write comments on a web page. So the tech has been around since 1999. As to your suggestion, people who have been using Diigo sticky notes for years for entirely legit research and teaching purposes would not take kindly to Diigo removing this great feature because some people just realized that it has been possible to add comments on a web site unbeknown to the site’s author for 10 years and don’t like it.

Moreover, this is the same tech that enables online captioning of videos e.g. at Overstream.net. And if you can add captions, you can also add comments. So should that captioning possibility be scrapped too?

Why don’t you and Harry trust users’ intelligence a bit more? If a user can view sidewiki, it means s/he has it on her/his toolbar and most likely uses it too, so s/he knows how it works. Therefore it is unlikely s/he’ll be so daft as to confuse the Sidewiki content with the content of the page.

Bonnie Bracey Sutton

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, editor, policy issues, on 9 Oct. 2009, 6:22AM: You guys must have a lot more time than I have, but also you are not in DC where I have too many meetings to go to. I will check Sidewiki out.

Harry Keller (10.9.09, 6:53AM): I see the problem as simply that your web site URL, without any added characters — in my case, http://www.smartscience.net — would be delivered with the added comment to all of those with Google toolbars who, upon urging by Google, accepted the invitation to add Sidewiki. That fact might be just dandy for people publishing research papers and those making Internet noise with their blogs (as I have). However, it invites disaster for all organizations, for-profit and non-profit, who publicize their missions, products, and services on the Internet.

Don’t like the Red Cross? Just Sidewiki-swipe it. Upset that your competitor landed that big contract that you should have? Sidewiki-swipe their site with allegations about sexual misconduct or misappropriation of funds or any other negative stuff you can imagine. Assuming that lots of people have Sidewiki, the allegation could quickly go viral and be unstoppable. Such allegations in blogs are shrugged off these days. You have to find your way to the particular blog, after all. A competitor’s blog would have to be found and would not contain really nasty claims about competition because it would reflect poorly on the company.

On the other hand, the ugly comments would appear to every Sidewiki user who happened upon your site in its native, unamended, and true location in web space: its URL.

I really do not like the idea of my own URL being directly contaminated with stuff over which I have no control. Control of your own web site is a central concept of the Internet.

Furthermore, I have devoted my technical resources for ten years to creating a Web 2.0 resource (although it wasn’t called that when I began). Every customer starts at a specific URL in order to use our service. I may be able to take down my marketing URL, smartscience.net, and avoid Sidewiki problems there. However, I cannot take down my production site. Someone could put pornographic references there for any 6th grade student using my service, and it would reflect on me personally. My business would disappear in a heart beat. A decade of outrageously hard work and self-denial would be snuffed out before I even knew what was happening.

As I said before, I don’t know about Diigo or the others, but I suspect that they have not tied into the unvarnished URLs of web sites as has Google so that when your browser hits that site, whether you care or not, the Sidewiki panel appears. You should have to use another URL or specifically ask for comments. My web site is my web site and my URL should display it and it alone.

David G. LebowDavid Lebow, on 9 Oct. 2009, 8:48AM: I remember people speculating about third-party annotation in the early ‘90s with the advent of the Mosaic browser. Even then, people were concerned about “trespassing” as a problem.

The alternative solution to Sidewiki is to provide “owners” of websites and web pages with Java script libraries and APIs that add third-party annotation. Owners could then choose to add social annotation to their web pages while maintaining control over postings.

Claude Almansi (10.9.09, 9:51AM): Hi Harry. Diigo also works on the web site URL, without any added characters. Click here for an example of a screenshot of the Google page for Sidewiki when viewed by Diigo.com subscribers with the Diigo side navigation bar activated and one set of sticky notes opened inside the web site. I have circled in red the points were Diigo.com subscribers have added sticky notes. I did the screenshot opening the sticky notes set with the one by “Magnolia South” for you, because it is the most critical about Sidewiki.

It is true that Diigo is partly safeguarded from people who would use its sticky notes for trolling because its primary purpose is social bookmarking, and trolls are not much into that. But if the Google anti-troll filter proves efficient enough, trolls will well fall back on Diigo.

[Harry Keller:] Don’t like the Red Cross? Just Sidewiki-swipe it. Upset that your  competitor landed that big contract that you should have? Sidewiki-swipe their site with allegations about sexual misconduct or misappropriation of funds or any other negative stuff you can imagine. Assuming that lots of people have Sidewiki, the allegation could quickly go viral and be unstoppable. Such allegations in blogs are shrugged off these days. You have to find your way to the particular blog, after all. A competitor’s blog would have to be found and would not contain really nasty claims about competition because it would reflect poorly on the company.

On the other hand, the ugly comments would appear to every Sidewiki user who  happened upon your site in its native, unamended, and true location in web space: its URL.

Sidewiki users would immediately know that the comments were done by another Sidewiki user, and would take them with the same skepticism as they would if they stumbled upon an external blog entry. (…)

As I said before, I don’t know about Diigo or the others, but I suspect that they have not tied into the unvarnished URLs of web sites as has Google so  that when your browser hits that site, whether you care or not, the Sidewiki panel appears. You should have to use another URL or specifically ask for comments. My web site is my web site and my URL should display it and it alone.

Granted, Gabbly does not tie into the “unvarnished URLs of websites,” as you have to add gabbly.com after http:// to create the Gabbly chat. But – see above – Diigo does, and has done so for 3 years now, whether you like it or not. So far no Diigo user has added sticky notes to your web site, but it might happen, just as with Sidewiki. If it does, don’t take it too hard. If the comments are legit and constructive, let them be. If they are not, ask the administrators of whichever platform is involved to remove them.

Again, please trust people’s intelligence a bit more: even if the comments appear on the left of your website at its unvarnished URL, they are quite clearly external comments that have nothing to do with the site – both with Diigo and Sidewiki.

PS re your Red Cross example: I confess I have been sorely tempted to add a sticky note to their job application page opened with Firefox, which tells you you have to use Internet Explorer. Quoting the staff officer who told me to go to a cybercafe to use IE there if I don’t have it, as there is no single other way to apply for a Red Cross job. I didn’t, because folks using IE would not see that message for non-IE-users, and because, well, I want to use Diigo for constructive things.

Harry Keller (10.9.09, 12:20PM): Hi Claude, I just have to assume, without any other information, that Diigo is potentially evil too. Given that this all is true, then the major difference is that Google is ubiquitous and so, much more dangerous. My issue is with people searching for “virtual labs” and clicking on the link to smartscience.net, seeing the stuff on the side, and assuming that it’s all true or that I’m somehow responsible.

Among means to thwart this problem are some clever java_script code (defeated if user has java_script off) and simply swarming your pages with your own positive comments and so drowning out any others.

Although the potential for this problem occurred with the first search engine, two big things had to happen since the advent of the Internet. First, commercial sites had to be possible. In the early days they would be flamed. Purists believed that the Internet should not contain commercial messages.

The second was the virtual monopoly of one search engine. I used to think it would be Alta Vista. Was I ever wrong. When a company name becomes a verb, you know trouble is just around the corner.

Although tagging of web sites sounds great in theory, it’s really a dangerous way to run things.

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Prix Möbius Suisse Rewards Inaccessible Flash Site

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Claude Almansi

Claude AlmansiBy Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

Last Saturday, Oct. 3, 2009, the awards ceremony of  Premio Möbius took place in Lugano (CH). There were two categories: Premio Möbius Multimedia, for cultural CDs and DVDs in Italian, and Grand Prix Möbius Suisse, for Swiss websites about cultural heritage.

Prix Möbius international de la Communauté Européenne, Scienza Tecnica e Medicina, Cultura, Arti e Lettere, Educazione e Formazione permanente, Premio Möbius Multimedia Lugano

Prix Möbius candidates

In the Prix Möbius category, the candidates were:

Accessibility and ease of navigation

As for accessibility and ease of navigation,  the Zurich Kunsthaus and Centre Dürrenmatt sites are the best: they read well in linear version (as spoken by screen readers) and have hierarchical headers, which allow people using a screen reader to quickly navigate from section to section (unfortunately, the Centre Dürrenmatt, being a national museum, has to use the drab template of all Swiss federal and cantonal sites).

Next best is the site of Museum Franz Gertsch; “next” because in order to enter the otherwise accessible and easily navigable rest of the site, you have to click on the word “mehr” (more) in the home page – not a very intuitive process.

Then, on a par, there are  the websites of Fotomuseum Winterthur and Site Archéologique de la Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, which don’t use hierarchical headers, hence are not easily navigable with a screen reader.

The worst by far is the site of the m.a.x. museo:

screenshot of the site as seen with Firefox on a laptop with 1280x800 screen

Screenshot of the site as seen with Firefox on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen.

The site is entirely in Flash. What a screen reader would voice is “Page has three frames and no linksm.a.x.museo colon plus forty-one left paren zero right paren ninety-one six hundred eighty-two fifty-six fifty-six dash Internet ExplorerFrameFrame end.FrameFrame end.FrameFrame end.”

Actually, in spite of the “no links,” there are two links: to the Italian and the English version, but as they are within the Flash movie, the screen-reader cannot identify them. And these two don’t even show on a laptop with 1280×800 screen, using Firefox (see screenshot above).

And the winner of Prix Möbius Suisse . . .

. . . is the site of the m.a.x. museo, www.maxmuseo.ch. Leaving aside its violation of accessibility norms, the motivation for awarding it the Prix Moebius is rather odd: “It achieves an immediate, natural and linguistically coherent synthesis of the museum’s identity and of Max Huber’s world” (my translation). Now all the site says about the museum’s identity and Max Huber’s world is:

. . . the m.a.x. museo was established on the 12th of November 2006 by the wife of leading Swiss graphic designer, the late Max Huber, Aoi Huber-Kono, with the aim of disseminating design culture and leaving his work to posterity.
It is the aspiration of this museum that it will serve as a bridge towards young designers and artists of future generations through various exhibitions, while conveying the message of Max Huber who dedicated his life to design.
We plan to organize exhibitions primarily on graphic design in order to present “design” in general to the world.

Very synthetic indeed – not even a single link to other information about Max Huber in the links section.

Granted, the flash movie is pretty. But is this enough to decree that a site is “the best site for cultural heritage,” as the description of Prix Moebius Suisse maintains?

Two paradoxes

The first paradox is that the jury of Prix Moebius Suisse is chaired by Professor Paolo Paolini, who is in charge of a Master’s course in Design of Interactive Applications for Cultural Heritage. Does he really think the purely-flash site of the m.a.x museo is an example his students should follow?

The second paradox is that Professor Paolo Paolini is co-author, with his colleagues of the Lugano Università della Svizzera Italiana, Elisa Rubegni, Alberto Terragni and Stefano Vaghi, of “Accessibility for Blind Users: An Innovative Framework” (Springer Verlag, 2008), whose abstract says:

. . . The main thesis of this paper, which focuses on blind users, is that technical recommendations (as those of the W3C) are not sufficient to guarantee actual accessibility, that we define as the possibility for the users of “reading” the website and “navigating through it” in an effective manner. A consequence of our approach is the emphasis on design, as a way to achieve actual accessibility, and on usability (by blind users,) as the main evaluation criterion. . . .

Actually, Making Content Understandable and Navigable was already one of the two main themes of the first WC3’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0). And WCAG 2.0 has a whole section entitled Provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are.

If more websites – including the site of the Moebius Awards, www.moebiuslugano.ch, which presently conveys textual info in the .jpg image reproduced at the top of this post without an alternative description and violates accessibility commonsense in too many further ways to list here – at least applied these existing guidelines, people with disabilities would have an easier time reading and navigating them.

So Professor Paolini and his colleagues want to go further than these WCAG, apparently. That’s great. But then, why did he, as chairman of the Prix Möbius jury, allow the award to go to a site that is fully inaccessible to blind people?

Political poisoned gift?

Could there be a political agenda behind the selection of the m.a.x museo site? A kind of “cultural exception” protectionist policy à la French? An unwritten rule to favor local sites [1], no matter how unusable and inaccessible?

If so, this is a very short-sighted and harmful policy, particularly for such flash-only sites:

  • The content of  sites made entirely in flash does not get indexed by search engines, which cannot parse text inserted in a movie anymore than in a .jpg picture. When I tried to find info about a very beautiful exposition of Bruno Munari‘s work the Museum had in 2008 by googling “max museo Chiasso” (without quotes), the first hit was indeed to section www.maxmuseo.ch/en/museo.html of the museum’s site, but that page says nothing about the Munari.
    And if you try the Google cache link for this hit, a message says: “This is Google’s cache of http://www.maxmuseo.ch/en/museo.html. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 16 Jul 2009 22:32:17 GMT. (…) These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: max museo munari.”
  • Sites made entirely in flash do not open at all in cell phones, and that again is paradoxical, considering that the Möbius Awards ceremony on Oct. 3, 2009, started with a round table about digital natives, where speakers underline the present evolution towards cell phones rather than computers for internet use.

Hence awarding the Prix Möbius to such a site lulls the site owner into thinking they have a good thing, whereas they only have a pretty gimmick that cuts them off from search engine results and from cell phone users. Above all, the award is an insult to blind people – and in the case of m.a.x museo Chiasso, to low-sighted people as well, as the navigation links in the flash movie are in very pale grey on white.

__________

[1] Re this possible political bias for Ticinese websites: in 2008, the Prix Moebius for cultural heritage went to kunstpanorama.ch, the sanely textual site of the Luzern Kunsthalle, though they also gave a special mention for cacticino.net,  yet another Ticinese flash website (of the Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino). This is proven by web.archive.org/web/20080511213956/http://www.moebiuslugano.ch/annun.html, i.e., the version of the awards announcement saved on May 11, 2009, by the Internet Archive and by the entries about this 2008 Möbius award in Kultpavillon.ch, the blog of Kunstpanorama.ch. However, the page for the 2008 awards of the Premio Moebius website strangely lists cacticino.net for the Cultural Heritage award and kunstpanorama.ch for the special mention.

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Twitter Could Drive You Cuckoo – If You’re Not Prepared

Posted on October 4, 2009 by JimS

Claude AlmansiBy Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

[Note: This article was first posted as a comment to Lynn Zimmerman‘s “Twitter Could Drive You Cuckoo” (1 Oct. 2009).]

At first, Dr. Alloway’s criticism of Twitter may seem part of a long line that includes Rousseau’s of La Fontaine’s fables in L’Emile, Flaubert’s of novels in Madame Bovary, Orwell’s of Boys’ Weeklies, and further educational damnings of TV, transistor radio, the internet, blogs, Facebook itself. Education pundits tend to damn new things until they become familiar enough to pundit about them.

But Dr. Alloway is not an education pundit. She is an educator concretely helping a group of slow-learning 11-14 year olds to improve their short term memory and reporting what she has seen in this group. Hence the unfairness of Malcolm Parks’s comment to the Higher Ed Morning article about the fact she has no research paper about new media use and short term memory: one doesn’t write a research paper on such a statistical basis.

Some other comments are more constructive, suggesting the exploration of more active and learning-enhancing uses of Twitter. Also possibly relevant: Danah Boyd’s Twitter: “Pointless Babble” or Peripheral Awareness + Social Grooming? (16 August 2009) on the importance of socializing and on the fact that socializing communication – in real life too – contains a lot of phatic roughage, i.e., utterances only aimed at indicating readiness to interact with others. If you have a bad short term memory, telling this “roughage” apart from content communication might be difficult.

But there might be a very concrete usability factor in the different impacts Facebook and Twitter have on Dr. Alloway’s students. For someone who has short-time memory problems, Facebook is easier to use because Facebook messages stay put, whereas they slide away very fast in Twitter. So her students are more likely to be paralyzed into passivity by this rapid flow than their peers who have a better short-term memory and can use the Twitter search engine or a remembered hashtag to participate in a conversation about a given theme.

_____________________________

Education pundits tend to damn new things until they become familiar enough to pundit about them.

_____________________________

To overcome this issue, she might show her students how they can limit the number of people they are following until they get more familiar with Twitter so that their homepage is less crowded and does not move so fast; how to bookmark the RSS feeds of hashtags for conversation topics they’d like to participate in; how to mark a given tweet as favorite and, in general, explore with them the Getting Started topics of Twitter’s help forum – help forum topics don’t glide away, and they can be bookmarked in a browser.

Another possible factor might be young slow-learners’ fear of seeming dumb in a whirl of fast moving Twitter conversations, just as in real-life fast moving ones: people tend to equate quick-wittedness with intelligence and slower thinking with stupidity, and this is possibly even more true for pre-teens and teens.

Here, an educator might show people who need more time both to understand and to utter how to use twitter to bring people to other modes of conversation, for instance, by tweeting links to blog or forum discussions where they can have enough time. This can even be automated: new posts and comments on ETC are automatically announced at http://twitter.com/etcjournal via twitterfeed.com, which translates the entries RSS feed and the comments RSS feed into tweets. Same with many other twitter accounts.

The twitter whirlwind might drive some people cuckoo if they enter it unprepared. But they can be shown how to use its power to steer themselves and others towards quieter conversation venues.

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Twitter Bad for the Brain? – Balderdash, Poppycock, Twaddle

Posted on October 4, 2009 by JimS

John SenerBy John Sener

[Note: This article was first posted as a comment to Lynn Zimmerman‘s “Twitter Could Drive You Cuckoo” (1 Oct. 2009).]

Studies like this, and the related reportage and unsupported speculation, are what could drive me cuckoo. More accurately, taking such reportage (and the related study behind it?) seriously is likely to be far less healthy for one’s brain and working memory than Twitter.

Look closely at what’s going on here. The cited articles make no mention of how Twitter was used in the study. So I spent (wasted?) 30 minutes or so looking for the actual study. Still haven’t found it. That’s your first clue: the assertion that Twitter is bad is mostly, perhaps entirely, an echo chamber.

A Google search did not yield the study; none of the articles I found have a link to it. I did find Dr. Alloway’s web site; that should have been promising — except that I couldn’t find a link to the study there either. I found a couple of references buried on her web site and through Google searches, but none which appear to be the related study either. Much more easy to find on her web site are links to all the media coverage she’s received and the talks she’s giving. That’s your second clue.

It appears from her web site that she’s doing some good research to establish the importance of working memory, among other areas. Bravo for that. She claims that it’s more valuable than IQ as a measure of intelligence (although the study I found measures the efficacy of working memory in terms of increased performance on IQ, literacy, and numeracy tests — hmmm). But even this appears to be a double-edged sword: she is also promoting “JUNGLE MEMORY, a brain-training program based on my research and promoted by Pearson Education, improved from a grade C to a B, and a B to an A after just 12 weeks! It is the only training program scientifically proven to raise grades.” So her web site is long on self-promotion and short on links to actual research.

______________________________

Clearly working memory as defined is an important skill. But why is it THE most important skill?

______________________________

But here’s the thing: What does all this have to do with Twitter being unhealthy for working memory? Where’s the evidence, the data? I found someone who suggested that the study did not actually test Twitter (can’t find that reference now). Dr. Alloway herself noted in a comment on her web site that the conclusions are “based on findings from a pilot study, more to follow once the study is complete.” Hmmm. Someone else on her web site asked four weeks ago for a link to the complete study; no response was posted. The reportage also suggests that Twitter was not actually tested, and that its detrimental effects are pure speculation on Dr. Alloway’s part. As reported in the Scotsman, “Paul Allen, editor of ComputerActive magazine, questioned the study and said technology like Twitter was ‘too new’ to make conclusions about. He said: “‘It sounds very spurious. I don’t see a correlation between the length of a message you send someone and the effect on memory. It could be a really interesting Twitter message.’” Exactly.

But in the meantime, the blogosphere has already run wild, and sooner or later you’ll be hearing someone tell you how science has shown that Twitter is bad for your brain. Just like another British scientist ran amok earlier this year with unsubstantiated speculation about how social networking sites were harming children’s brains.

Fortunately, the British have also provided us with several fine words for dealing with such situations: Balderdash. Poppycock. Twaddle.

To me, the worst part about this is that it totally obscures a deeper, more important question. As Dr. Alloway says on her web site, “Cutting-edge research has shown that working memory—the ability to store and manipulate information—is the most important learning skill a child can have. Working memory is the foundation of good grades and a successful life beyond the classroom. Without it, students would fail at every task, and with it they can dramatically improve their classroom performance.”

Clearly working memory as defined is an important skill. But why is it THE most important skill? It makes sense to say that if you believe that classroom performance as currently defined (store and manipulate information as per the teacher’s requirements) is in fact most important. But if you believe that there are more important skills, and that getting good grades is at least as much about social conditioning as it is about learning, then you would be asking a different set of questions. Ones, sadly, which we are not going to hear in this media blitz of misinformation…

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Anita Pincas

Posted on October 1, 2009 by JimS

Institute of Education, University of London
Faculty Member, Faculty of Policy and Society

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Twitter Could Drive You Cuckoo

Posted on October 1, 2009 by JimS

Lynn ZimmermannBy Lynn Zimmerman
Editor, Teacher Education

In “Study: How Twitter Is Hurting Students” on the Higher Ed Morning web site, Carin Ford gives an overview of several kinds of social networking sites and how they affect our brains.

The article includes a link to another article, “Facebook ‘Enhances Intelligence’ but Twitter ‘Diminishes It’, Claims Psychologist,” by Lucy Cockcroft, which examines the research conducted by Scottish psychologist Dr. Tracy Alloway.

Tracy AllowayAlloway contends that using Facebook helps improve working memory while Twitter, text messaging, and watching YouTube actually weaken it.

The Ford article invites readers to comment on the article and asks: Do you interact with students on Facebook? The reader responses are equally as interesting as the two articles. One response questions the validity of Alloway’s report. Others discuss pros and cons of using Twitter and Facebook in the educational setting.

These links seem to complement the various discussions that have been on ETC recently regarding the use of social networking sites in the educational setting, including Interview: Steve Cooper of TechUofA. TechUofA uses Facebook as a learning management system.

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Science Labs and Accessibility

Posted on October 1, 2009 by JimS

Harry KellerBy Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

In all of the time I have been working on making real science labs available over the Internet, I’ve spent little time on accessibility. Of course, I made the obligatory efforts with ALT and TITLE tags to images and made sure that font sizes can be set by the user. The question of who would be using the new technology to reap the benefits of doing real science labs was not foremost in my mind until I read an article in the Montana Kaimin entitled “Disability Services Undermanned and Overworked” written by Kimball Bennion.

Here’s the excerpt that grabbed my attention:

Justyn Field, a senior in print journalism, said he dropped a science class he was taking in the 2008 spring semester because he wasn’t able to get to the class’s science lab in the Health Sciences Building.

Field was born with VACTRL association, a birth defect that limits his mobility and also inflicts other internal problems. Field is able to walk a little, but moves mostly with a wheelchair.

Field said he tried to keep the class while doing an online lab that the department put together for him, but it wasn’t comparable to working in the actual lab.

“How do you do an online lab?” Field said. He also had to pay an extra fee for taking the class online.

“It was absolutely atrocious,” he said.

This small story highlights two significant messages. Online technology holds out great hope for access to learning opportunities denied due to disabilities, and it hasn’t fully delivered on this hope.

Consider the issues surrounding a person in a wheelchair taking a chemistry lab. The aisles where students work back-to-back on their experiments are probably too narrow to accommodate a wheelchair. The countertops are too short for a seated person to reach. Some disabilities affect fine motor coordination and make working with dangerous chemicals, well, dangerous. Safety equipment disabledsuch as eyewash fountains are too high to be useful to a seated person. The lab benches don’t usually have knee space underneath and so prevent a wheelchair user from getting close enough to the bench to do the work even if it weren’t so high. As very much a tyro at understanding disability issues in schools, I am sure that I’ve only begun a list that experts can readily expand. I’m making the point that just getting a wheelchair inside the door of a chemistry lab may not be sufficient.

A great online science lab experience could make a world of difference for Justyn Field and many others. The University of Montana made an effort to provide online labs for him. The article doesn’t say what the subject was, and I suspect that it wasn’t chemistry. Still, the same concepts apply, although not so severely, to many other subjects. Mr. Field ended up taking an astronomy class that had access to the lab facilities.

Our schools and disabled students should have excellent online science labs, not the “absolutely atrocious” ones that Mr. Field was subjected to. I have a personal stake in this discussion because I have worked on one solution for the last ten years. We should have great online lab experiences ready for the Justyn Fields of the world. They would also help immensely in cases where sick students must stay at home for extended periods, for juvenile detention facilities that must provide education to their wards, for very small schools in poor rural areas, for alternative education schools with students who have social problems, and for many others.

This all may seem to be a somewhat minor point to many, but it’s not so minor to the very large number of students affected by the lack of access to science labs. They’re being denied the education they deserve.

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Review of Traxler’s ‘Students and Mobile Devices’

Posted on September 25, 2009 by JimS

Tom PreskettBy Tom Preskett

I heard that the best ALT (Association of Learning Technology, UK) paper this year was Students and Mobile Devices: Choosing Which Dream by John Traxler so I thought I’d review it.

Generally, it was very interesting and gives a good overview of the implications mobile devices have for education. There were times when the words “mobile devices” could have been replaced with “Web 2.0” and there were points with which I disagree.

Here some of the key passages with my comments:

“Students no longer need to engage with information and discussion at the expense of real life but can do so as part of real life as they move about the world, using their own devices to connect them to people and ideas…”

That’s a great description, isn’t it. Even if you don’t agree with it, it’s great. When you read it, you need to think in terms of multimedia rather than text. However, for the connect part I don’t think we are there yet. Certainly, my iphone doesn’t connect well enough in enough places to be used in this way.

“Interacting with mobile technolgies is different and is woven into all the times and places of students’ lives. Mobile phones have created “simultaneity of place”: a physical space and a virtual space of conversational interaction, and an extension of physical space, through the creation and juxtaposition of a mobile social space.”

Thinking about it, maybe mobile devices more than Web 2.0 in general will have more success in challenging the domination of the didactic lecture. With mobile technologies woven in, education will have to accomodate them and their social nature will slowly creep into the teaching and learning.

“When we say we can ignore desktop technologies but not mobile technologies we mean that desktop technologies operate in their own little world, mobile technologies operate in the world.”

Again, this is catchy, but I think this goes too far. It’s not as if every office space with a computer exists in another world or is outside reality. Anyway, the point is well made that there is a here-and-now aspect to mobile technologies that can surely be utilised by education.
iphone
“With the possibility of perpetual contact, the mobile phone ends in fact by shaping time as a container of potentially continuing connection.”

With the always on connection and a myriad of methods to do so, the only constraints to staying in contact is the consent of the people involved. There are now no restrictions. It’s worth saying that this isn’t all about mobile technologies because once people reach home most switch to laptops/PCs. What this means for education is that it’s one of the more obvious challenges to the ridiculous notion that we learn in neat sessions according to a timetable Monday-Friday. This is part of the formal vs informal learning debate.

“Mobile devices are also eroding physical place as a predominant attribute of space. The phrase absent presence (Gergen, 1996) describes situations where groups of people physically together, co-located, are all connected elsewhere.”

This is challenging the physical buildings of our education institutions. Some good points in this issue have been made in the CreateDebate: UK Higher Education needs more radical change than a debate about who funds it. It’s worth noting that it’s wrong to attribute all these notions to mobile technologies in isolation. I see them as part of the Web 2.0/socail media ethos — an ethos which has at its heart the natural human inclination to communicate, network, and, above all, socialise. I talk about this in my blog post Use Social Media — Fulfill Your Destiny!.

“Educational provision is built around time and place: the timetable, hand-in dates, the classroom, the year-group, the deadline and the laboratory… the education system, especially the formal university system, is getting out of step with how many students perceive the world they live in and… changes are needed to keep universitites aligned to a changed and mobile society.”

This is worth recording because it echoes a sentiment that I agree with: Higher education is behind the schools when it comes to use of learning technologies. Again with the above, you could substitute the word “mobile” with “Web 2.0.”

“These changes and trends will cause significant shifts in the idea of ownership, specifically the ownership of technology and of knowledge.”

This is an important point that relates to learners taking more control of their learning. However, it needs unpicking. From students’ point of view, they are owning when and where they access their learning so there is freedom and choice in that sense. This is important because of the impact that it should have on the way learning is delivered.

“In its earliest forms, knowledge and learning came from lectures, a linear format from an authoritative ‘sage-on-the-stage’ with no pause, fast forward or rewind, and from books, substantial and linear but segmented and randomly accessed. the delivery of knowledge and learning by networked comptuers meant . . . new heuristics of usablity that prescribed how knowledge and learning should be chunked and presented.”

There are two important issues here. First, a major motivation for change from me. The transmissive mode is flawed because if you miss something then you’ve missed it. And if you’ve missed something at the beginning then that’s it for the rest of the lesson. It’s as if part of the challenge of learning is being able to concentrate fully for the entire time. Any mind wandering (something I do) and, well, that’s tough! Any disruption (more on this later) like communication and you’re out!

The other issue is the attempts at chunking of textbooks that I remember from school. We would skip from chapter to chapter in an attempt to follow a contextualised route through the learning. You would think once a better mechanism for achieving this were invented education would jump all over it.

“Mobiles devices extend and enhance this voice because they allow users to capture content, for example images, sounds, data and voices themselves, form the real world, from events as they happen, specific to when and where they happen.”

It’s important to note that the other big area where mobile devices can really make a difference (apart from the “simultaneity of place” issue) is with multimedia. It really is so powerful to be able take videos and photos on the spot and network this immediately.

______________________________

It’s important to note that the other big area where mobile devices can really make a difference . . . is with multimedia. It really is so powerful to be able take videos and photos on the spot and network this immediately.

______________________________

Now some things I disagreed with:

“There are drawbacks. The first is that these developments reinforce a tendency to view knowledge and other forms of content merely as commodities or assets. The second is that this choice and control are exercised at a purely personal level, allowing individuals to each pursue their own curiosity, constructing their own private libraries and inhabiting their own worlds of knowledge. This erodes the idea of a commonly accepted canon, a common curriculum, of things we all need to know and are assumed to know and replaces it with what some poeple have referred to a neo-liberal nightmare — not dream but nightmare.”

With the first point, I don’t really see the problem. How people view the knowledge or engage with the learning is up to them. We don’t need to control how people think. The second point I disagree with. He views greater learner freedom and a loosening of control over educational institutions over any aspect of the learning process as a bad thing. The opposite is true for me. He’s actually describing a utopian PLE. Strange as this passage seems at odds with the spirit of the rest of the paper.

More on disruption: “There is a weak version of disruption that amounts to nuisance; phone calls in class, texting in exams, photographs that should not be taken, inappropriate ring-tones and so on. There is however also a strong version of disruption. These devices allow students to access and store images and infromation of their own choosing and perhaps create and distribute new images and information independently of the lecturers and of the university.”

I would add communication opportunities to this. What he’s challenging here is the notion of disruption as necessarily bad. — a notion that prevails at present. Certainly, mobile devices are seen purely as a nuisance in current educational structures. The weak version description is what they say, but really the strong version of disruption is what they are worried about — worried that they will have to change and accommodate.

On infrastructure: “Wholeheartedly adapting an approach centred on student devices is challenging and radical for institutional IT units. Their roles would change drastically, depending on the institution and its mission, and on its finances.”

Not much to say except yes. But I don’t think, wholeheartedly, adaptation will happen any time soon. Here and now, wifi has to be standard and of a high quality in education and elsewhere.

Some points about formal/informal learning: “We used to make a distinction between formal learning activities in our universities on our equipment and self-motivated learning activities outside our institutions not on our equipment… If we are to embrace student devices, this simple dichotomy breaks down and the boundary becomes blurred.”

This is informal or learning that needs to, first, be acknowledged and then engaged. The breaking down of the boundaries is only troublesome if you teach by habit rather than design. If you have deliberate and informed learning design then catering for this is manageable.

“Guaranteeing e-safety becomes more problematic when on the one hand we encourage the use of student devices for learning but on the other hand have no ability or authority to control how, when or where they are used, nor any control over the applications, data or networks they support. At the very least, policies of acceptable use must evolve rapidly to address the affordances of student devices.”

I think seeing everything through the prism of control isn’t correct here. It comes from a standpoint where the institutions are at the centre of education rather than the learner, which is wrong. E-safety is so overplayed in education. Yes, we need to take care, but we shouldn’t shut things down on this proviso. Also, I wouldn’t worry about “policies of acceptable use” as these seem to spring up almost before they know how to use something.

About training: “. . . faces staff developers with the enormous challenge of preparing teachers and lecturers to work with a range of devices.”

Yes, and this is a mantra of mine as I can often not get past this area in my context. However, I would say that the goalposts are shifting in this respect. Increasingly, new tools/environments are becoming easy to use and more intuitive. So it’s more a case of getting educator to experience using a tool/environment rather than learning how-to use it. Only by experiencing a tool/environment can they understand what it’s all about. This is particularly true of Web 2.0.

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Lecture Your Way to Stardom!

Posted on September 22, 2009 by JimS

Tom PreskettBy Tom Preskett

Karl Kapp talks about teachers who have gone on to become rock stars in “Teacher . . . Stepping Stone to Rock Star?”  Interesting . . . and surprising they let a young Sting teach at a convent school! Anyway, my point here is the notion of teacher as a rock star is something that is common and can be negative when it comes to challenging the sage on the stage notion and moving towards a more collaborative approach. Sometimes I see it in their eyes: “Do you really think I’m going to give up being the centre of attention?” Of the many barriers to the adoption of learning technologies of the Web 2.0 variety, this is one of the least acknowledged.

KISS Boston 2004

Taking the focus away from the teacher/lecturer isn’t what the all powerful one wants. This is where ego gets in the way, and quite simply there are many who like the sound of their own voice too much. When thinking about a blended approach, how likely is it that someone like this is going to countenance replacing some of the face-to-face with e-learning? Or adopt any kind of learner centric approach that diminishes his or her role from expert to facilitator or guide?

Sting 2009

I am, of course, playing devil’s advocate to some extent. I have more respect for the teaching profession than almost any other, and there are so many brilliant teachers. However, some of the brilliant ones fall into the above category. They need to be more flexible and, in some ways, feel less threatened by new ideas. 

Remember the focus should be on what’s best for the learner — not the teacher.

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‘Please Prepare for Cross Check’: A Review of ‘Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities’

Posted on September 17, 2009 by JimS

Stefanie PankeBy Stefanie Panke
Editor, Social Software in Education

In August 2009, I received an email from Etienne Wenger, announcing a book he has written with Nancy White and John D. Smith called Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009). In a way, this book is a follow up activity on a survey of community oriented technologies that Etienne published in 2001. I was amongst those who downloaded this report, finding an overview of various technology products and – more important – inspiring insights that helped me to understand the role of technology for communities. We were in the process of implementing community features for the portal e-teaching.org, a German Web site on e-learning in higher education. Since then, the concepts of situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice have greatly influenced my work on the design of educational resources.

In a community of practice “learning means to become, that is, to belong differently than we do at the moment” (Lee & Roth, 2003). Since Howard Rheingold’s seminal work on virtual communities (1993), online communities of various kinds and in very different fields, such as marketing, education, community informatics, etc., attract researchers’ and practitioners’ attention alike. A fundamental question across the various perspectives and domains has been up to now how online communities work: How do they come into existence? What are critical success factors? And how can technology be designed to support community development? Digital Habitats develops a conceptual model to describe the skills necessary for choosing, implementing, and maintaining digital tools that enable a communities’ togetherness. The character of the work can be placed somewhere between practitioner’s guide, academic reflection, and visionary pamphlet. The book’s eleven chapters are clustered into four parts: “Introduction,” “Literacy,” “Practice,” and “Future.” The following summary outlines the content of each part and highlights a chapter or concept that I found particularly inspiring.

Cover of the book Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith

Part I

The first three chapters introduce the idea of learning communities, explore how their development is intertwined with technology, and finally define the notion of technology stewarding: “Technology stewardship is an emerging role that describes both a responsibility and a practice – an attitude as well as all the conversations, decisions, and learning that address the design and management of a community’s technology infrastructure” (33).

I was most impressed with the theme of chapter 2, which gives a historical overview of the mutual influence between communities and technology, drawing a bow from the Well to Web 2.0 and from the physicists at CERN to Ward Cunningham’s first wiki, invented to support the pattern community. “Technologies have changed how we think about communities, and communities have changed our uses of technology” (21). Technologies enable communities to form and to act in new ways, offering infrastructures for interactivity and connectedness. At the same time, communities have played a critical role in the invention of new technologies.

Part II

Chapters 4 to 6 introduce three different models on technology’s role for communities. These models constitute a specific kind of media literacy that allows for analyzing the technology needs of a community and pursuing a course of action. The first model includes different aspects of technologies such as tools, features, platforms, and configurations. The second model points out the inherent dilemmas of everyday community life. The third model deals with the specific traits of different communities, their so called orientation. “Communities learn together in different ways: some meet regularly, some converse online, some work together, some share documents, some develop deep bonds, and some are driven by the mission they serve. We say that these communities have different orientations towards the process of learning together. An orientation is a typical pattern of activities and connections through which members experience being a community” (69).

Chapter 5 offers a thoughtful perspective on the technology landscape, building upon three inherent polarities that challenge technology use in a community: Togetherness vs. separation, participation vs. reification, individual vs. group identity.

  • Togetherness vs. separation: Community interaction follows a rhythm of togetherness and separation. The use of synchronous and asynchronous tools and the alteration between them are part of this rhythm.  “How do synchronous tools contribute to a community’s rhythm, both because they enable members to be together in time and because they often leave traces in the form of recordings or transcripts? In an asynchronous conversation, how often do people have to post something to sustain an experience of togetherness?” (57).
  • Participation vs. reification: One could also call this polarity “interacting vs. publishing.” For instance, the writer’s community behind the ETC blog has a lot of discussion and negotiation that is handled through a mailing list. This is the “participation” part, where we interact with one another and negotiate meaning and identity. The “reification” part is happening when we actually write a blog entry or pursue a project: “Literally, reification means making into an object” (57).
  • Individual vs. group identity: Learning together in a community of practice does not require or produce a homogenous group of people, all focused on the same goals. Communities cannot expect to have everyone’s full attention, since the activity level, learning aspirations, and needs vary individually. This creates both a challenge and potential for discourse, both being fueled by technology. “Technology contributes to the tension between individual and community. While a tool may be designed for groups, it is largely used individually, often when one is alone. Technology also increases the complexity of the group/individual polarity. By providing varied opportunities for togetherness, it also opens the possibilities for extreme multimembership” (59).

______________________________

“Technology contributes to the tension between individual and community. While a tool may be designed for groups, it is largely used individually, often when one is alone. Technology also increases the complexity of the group/individual polarity. By providing varied opportunities for togetherness, it also opens the possibilities for extreme multimembership.” –Wenger, White, and Smith

______________________________

Part III

Although the introduction states clearly that Digital Habitats is neither a shopper’s guide to technology products, nor a roadmap to technology selection, this part of the book comes close to filling out these roles. Chapter 7 addresses contextual factors that have an impact on technology choice, such as stage of community development, diversity and complexity, members’ experiences with and attitudes towards technology. Chapter 8 discusses the pros and cons of different acquisition strategies like “build your own,” “get a commercial platform,” “use open source tools,” “go for the free stuff,” etc.  The focus of chapter 9 is the ongoing role of technology stewardship in the daily life of a community. Chapter 10 gives a practitioner-oriented summary in the form of an “action notebook,” comprising checklists, step-by-step guides, questionnaires, and evaluation sheets. Actually, I found this section also interesting from a research perspective. One can use it as a concise instrument to analyze the characteristics of different online communities (see pages 149-152).

Part IV

The final part is an essay on the future of technology stewardship. The two central questions of this outlook are: “Where is the interplay between community and technology going?” and “How should technology stewards develop their practice?”

Chapter 11 identifies four emerging trends that influence out interaction within digital habitats. First, an increased connectivity around time and space is fostered by ubiquitous Web access through wireless networks and mobile devices (“always on”) as well as the new qualities of virtual co-presence in 3D environments. Second, we are facing new modes of engagement for interacting and publishing. The web is becoming a medium of self-expression. At the same time, technology enables mass collaboration on an increasing scale. Both perspectives are brought together through application programming interfaces (APIs) that support a constant remix of web content.  Third, the geographies of community and identity are changing. The complexity of the Web is growing. People can choose from a multitude of communities and resources. The boundaries between different Web sites are becoming more and more dynamic. Due to search engines, every voice popular enough becomes accessible. Individual content aggregation allows for a personal information diet that makes the mix palatable. Fourth, people are using the Web increasingly as a socially active medium. “The combination of distributed production, digital representation, and search capability make the web an active medium where the social and the informational build on each other” (179). Programs exchange and produce information about social relations, supported by semantic web technologies. Our digital footprints are intermingled with the reflections others imprint on us.

Who should read this book?

A review should not only tell you how much I liked the book, but also what you as a potential reader might get out of it. This calls for a clarification of the target group. Luckily, the authors have already done this job themselves, describing three groups of addressees.

  • Deep Divers are interested in exploring the connections between technology and community from an interdisciplinary angle. Their focus lies in applying conceptual models and learning theories to the domain of technology adoption by communities of practice.
  • Attentive Practitioners are interested in developing their practice, whether technology plays a major or minor part in it. They seek practical advice as well as theoretical concepts to communicate their role as technology stewards effectively.
  • Just Do-It-ers are action oriented with a strong focus on getting the job done. Their main interest is in practical tips and tricks while the more conceptual aspects are in the background.

This review reflects a “deep diver” perspective. A practitioner’s summary would most likely highlight different aspects of the book. Whatever description characterizes best your interest in online communities, Digital Habitats is great reading for those who seek a compass to navigate the technology ocean.

For additional information and further discussion, see the accompanying weblog: http://technologyforcommunities.com/

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Interview: Steve Cooper of TechUofA

Posted on September 15, 2009 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

Steve Cooper is founder of Tech University of America (TechUofA) and a former Army education trainer. The following interview was conducted via email from September 8 to 12.

JS: How did you come up with the idea of offering college courses for a flat monthly fee (e.g., $99 for all the classes a student wants to take) and how long have you been doing this?

SC: All of the courses that we are developing will be free and open to everyone. However, only when students want to begin a transcript and earn an academic certificate or degree is there  a $99/month that allows them to take ten courses per year. We only use free etextbooks/resources so there aren’t any other major fees associated with earning a degree.

While building several online university programs I watched as they artificially raised tuition to the student loan cap. I was one of the few for-profit CEOs who didn’t have an MBA or wasn’t a banker so I looked at things much differently. In 2007 when I took over as CEO of a for-profit university, I decided to lower tuition in order to make higher education accessible to more people. We immediately began to enroll students from Africa and several other countries. I found that if you have the same quality of faculty as other well established schools and run a transparent program then people will attend your school if you lower your tuition. At the same time I started to see the popularity of social networking sites explode while the economy started to weaken. I then realized that three things were hot: social networking sites, online learning, and lower or zero-tuition.

Steve Cooper1

Early in 2008, I used to drive over to University of Phoenix Online and sit in the parking lot in search of inspiration. I would sit there for hours watching the sunset, hoping to soak up some of their creative energies, while asking myself, “What would Dr. John Sperling, the founder of University of Phoenix, do today if he were to do it all over again?” I concluded that the first thing he would do is take education to the masses as he did years ago by bringing education from the ivory tower to the community in office buildings then eventually via distance learning. I think one of his greatest keys to success was leveraging existing resources rather than trying to force people to change. For example, he didn’t try to make the corporate offices where they held classes look “academic” nor did he develop some goofy learning management system to deliver their distance learning courses. Rather, they used the existing business offices and Outlook Express. People were familiar with regular office buildings (not intimidating like a college campus) and it was convenient. Also, most adults have used Outlook or Outlook Express so they lessened the learning curve by using systems students would be familiar with — and if they weren’t, chances were that someone they knew could help them — as opposed to building some esoteric and irrelevant elearning system that wasn’t intuitive to adult learners.

So, I eventually thought that if Dr. Sperling were to start over he would bring higher education to the masses. However, today the masses are in social networking sites. At this point I still had not seen a social networking site but realized that if they were generating that much buzz there had to be a reason. I logged into one and instantly said to myself that this is the ideal online classroom! A week later I directed one of my staff members to teach a course in a social networking site, PerfSpot.com, since I knew their leadership and found them to be dedicated to a global reach — and it was absolutely amazing! Social networking sites allow the faculty and students to control their online learning environment (end-user innovation) and can do all the things that conventional learning management systems can’t or won’t allow such as video, audio, showing photos of the users, widgets, etc.

Moreover, using social networking sites to deliver college courses greatly reduces our cost of delivering education since we pay neither learning management fees, which can be as high as $120 per student per course, nor technical staff for support. In essence, it’s a win-win-win because the social networking sites benefit from having more users (our students), we as a college gain by not having any learning management fees, and our faculty and students win because they get to control their learning environment.

JS: Are TechUofA courses accredited? If yes, by whom? If not, is lack of accreditation a problem?

SC: No. Tech University of America is not accredited. We must be operating for two years before we are eligible to apply for accreditation, and we intend to apply as soon as we are eligible in 2011. Since we are a start-up school we have a lot of R&D, yet, at the same time, we are a business so we have to actively seek ways to grow our student body. In order to better serve new schools as well as their prospective students, I believe that accrediting bodies should have a provision that allows for new schools to be conditionally accredited before they start offering courses and then heavily monitor them until they are accredited. In the meantime, we have to operate for two years prior to seeking accreditation, which does offer us time to improve our academic processes while fine tuning the operations of our university.

JS: Are TechUofA classes completely online? Or are students required to participate in F2F (face-to-face) activities at some point during a course? If not, is this lack of F2F contact a problem?

SC: All of our courses and programs are delivered 100% online, and we do not plan on any residency requirements. Recent studies have shown that online learners can attain the same, if not higher, learning outcomes than their F2F counterparts. Having said that, I do think that F2F interaction is obviously valuable. To this end we are exploring several ways that we can integrate various optional study programs that will bring some of our students who live around the world together for meaningful experiential and F2F learning.

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Steve Cooper: While I fully agree with Chris Anderson, author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price . . . that anything that becomes digital inevitably becomes free, I do think that we will see a hierarchy emerge within online learning: we will have free or very low priced schools, then more expensive programs, and finally exclusive online programs for the very wealthy . . . .

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JS: Is it possible for a student to complete a degree or certificate at TechUofA? Would this be a TechUofA degree or a degree offered by a college that relies on TechUofA courses?

SC: We will be offering certificate programs as well as associate, bachelor, and master degree programs in business management with several concentrations in fields such as criminal justice, sustainability, construction management, computer science, and sports management. However, we are beginning to partner with several colleges that are interested in using our courses — in these cases students who are enrolled in a partner school and complete our courses would receive credit/degrees from their school, not Tech University of America. In this case we will serve as a blackboard, if you will, with our courses hosted in Facebook, and partner schools will use them at their discretion.

JS: What is the instructor-to-student ratio for your classes? If the ratio is far greater than for F2F classes, how do TechUofA instructors manage the large number of students?

SC: Our student-to-faculty ratio is 1:20 for most courses, and 1:25 for the rest, which is about the average for most online schools, and considerably less than large research universities where ratios of 1:500 are not uncommon.

JS: If students enter a course at any time and exit at any time, I’d imagine that record keeping may be a major problem. Does the instructor monitor all of her/his students? Or is this managed by someone else?

SC: Non-degree seeking students, those who are just using the course materials, may come and go as they please. For our degree-seeking students we have definite start and end dates for each course, and each course is eight weeks in length. Since our courses have less than 25 students, our faculty are able to manage each course.

JS: Are TechUofA instructor salaries comparable to that of F2F institutions? Do you have full- and part-time instructors?

SC: We engage adjunct faculty members to teach our courses. They must have a graduate degree from an accredited school, with practical work experience in their field of study. We also require that our faculty have teaching experience at a regionally accredited school. This allows us to demonstrate that the quality of our faculty is comparable to that of accredited schools.

We use a variable pay model, with each faculty member earning $50-$75 per student. This incentivizes faculty to teach more students per course and is fair because the more they work, the more they earn. At the same time it helps us contain our costs since we are not paying faculty $2,000 when there are only four students in a course. The fact that we do not cap the amount faculty can earn means that they can do quite well. Also, our model encourages faculty to use their own videos in YouTube, social networking sites, etc., which can increase the likelihood that they will be able to secure a textbook contract because faculty who can demonstrate a substantial following these days are highly sought after by publishers. Finally, given that we charge $99 per month, you can see that 50-75% of our revenues go to faculty pay as they are the most critical part of our team.

JS: Does TechUofA rely on staff from countries where salaries and wages are much lower? If yes, is there a problem in quality?

SC: No. However, as we grow our international student body, we will explore hiring staff who reside in countries where we have a large student base so that our staff can relate well to our students, thus serving them better than we can here in Phoenix, Arizona. I must add that I personally am not convinced that outsourcing labor to other countries always saves a considerable amount of money, especially when you consider the inevitable travel, loss of business from language barriers, rising costs associated with outsourcing, etc.

JS: Is TechUofA international? In other words, do students come from many different nations? In U.S. TechUofA classes, are international students charged a higher fee?

SC: We are proud that we have had many inquiries from international students, and in our model everyone pays the same fees. However, we are working on raising money so that we can offer scholarships to people in developing countries so they do not have pay anything to earn a degree from Tech University of America. Also, we are working on building a networking system that allows more fortunate students to sponsor (pay for tuition) for students who cannot afford the $99 a month to earn a degree. We believe this will lead to several meaningful relationships between our students.

JS: Are services such as TechUofA growing in numbers and popularity? Do you foresee a time when the TechUofA way of providing classes will be the dominant means of earning a diploma, degree, or certificate? Will this be at the K-12 or college level? Or both?

SC: Absolutely. Click here for the best overview of this movement which refers to us as EduPunks. Yes, I do see a day when the Tech University of America model will be the prevailing way of providing online courses, and by this I mean using social networking sites as the learning management system rather than Blackboard, using free etextbooks rather than traditional textbooks, etc., but I do not think all schools will have all their courses offered for free and only charge $99 a month for degree seeking students. While I fully agree with Chris Anderson, author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, and his assertion that anything that becomes digital inevitably becomes free, I do think that we will see a hierarchy emerge within online learning: we will have free or very low priced schools, then more expensive programs, and finally exclusive online programs for the very wealthy that are as expensive as, if not moreso, than Harvard. At the same time I predict that we will only have 50 state schools – one for each state – that has football teams, fraternities, etc., and the rest of the students will attend private, for profit schools, either onground or online, especially given the rise of online high schools. I have been told there are more than one million online high schools students in America.

JS: Is student cheating a problem in TechUofA classes? If not, how is it handled?

SC: Student cheating, plagiarism, program integrity and student authentication are all serious challenges for all schools. The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 requires that a school that offers online courses have procedures in place to ensure that that students who enroll in a course are the same students who take the course and ultimately receive credits. While the HEOA doesn’t apply to us since we will not utilize Title IV funds (federal student loans), we are fully committed to ensuring program integrity. In addition to having a required assignment on personal accountability and plagiarism in our introductory course, have engaged CSIdentity’s Voice Verified product to ensure that the student who enrolls in Tech University of America is the same student who is in a particular course, completes course assisgnments, and ultimately receives academic credit. This is done by randomly verifying the biometrics of their voice throughout their entire course of studies, and the Voice Verified solution is more accurate than a fingerprint.

JS: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

SC: Sure, I think it is important to point out that Facebook, which is central to our model at Tech University of Ameirca, was created by students, for students, and it is fitting that Facebook is finally becoming the leading learning management system. I predict that within 2-5 years, Facebook will buy Blackboard and move all of its users into Facebook..

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Is a Virtual Revolution Brewing in Colleges?

Posted on September 14, 2009 by JimS

John SenerBy John Sener

The idea that US colleges and universities are on the brink of demise, or at least radical transformation, has been around for a long time. It’d be interesting to see how long, exactly, but Peter Drucker seems to be the progenitor of most current thinking. Over the past 20 years, based on his musings on education in his 1989 book The New Realities and accelerating with his 1997 prediction that large universities would become relics in 30 years, commentators have been concerned about the obsolete “business design” of the university (1996), echoing Drucker’s predictions of demise (2005) etc.

This year, the pace has picked up: David Wiley asserted that the “university will be irrelevant by 2020“; commentators are predicting that colleges are facing the same doomed fate as ailing newspapers for much the same reasons; and now we have this article, “A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges” by Zephyr Teachout (Washington Post, 13 Sep. 2009).

What is really going on here? Certainly it is ridiculous to take these predictions at face value. Every time one looks at them closely, they dissolve into irrelevance on the surface. This WaPo article is no exception: it goes completely off track by the end of the fifth sentence. “The market” is not the force for change in education; colleges are not like newspapers; education is about a lot more than sharing information; the social ritual of getting a dorm room is not disappearing anytime soon either. Teachout, as with other business-oriented commentators on education, does not understand that education is a complex system animated and sustained by a variety of important competing forces interacting dynamically with each other and operating fundamentally differently from business.

Tellingly, when I first tried to find the article on WaPo, the first article I found was a piece on how the University of Maryland is trying to crack down on drinking. It’s not a pretty scene, but social drinking is a much more powerful and cohesive force in university life than the cost of online learning (wasn’t paper-based correspondence learning cheaper also, BTW?). And anyone who thinks that universities will become “relics” in 18 years or so needs to chill out at a tailgating party. Drucker was brilliant, but even geniuses get it way wrong sometimes.

Teachout’s article, and indeed this entire line of thought, only makes sense to me in two respects (other than being flat out wrong): ( 1) the authors are just trying to get attention by provocative exaggeration, and (2) they are trying to move public opinion by asserting a position that is only casually related to rationality or actual facts. Both these are very much in tune with the times, but the numerous disconnects between superficial attention-seeking headlines or sound bites and the underlying reality bother me.

______________________________

What really bothers me, though, are the possible negative consequences of excessive hype. For example, online education has changed the face of higher education, but has it been “revolutionary” or “radical?” I would argue that it hasn’t.

______________________________

What does it mean, for example, to say that “universities will be irrelevant by 2020”? They have already been irrelevant for decades in some ways, which is why small liberal arts colleges exist and why community colleges, private for-profits like University of Phoenix, et al. have filled the vacuum in those areas that universities have mostly ignored during the expansion of higher education in the US over the past 40+ years. But maybe Wiley was merely aiming to provoke or prod in a particular direction rather than to predict. Perhaps this has become commonplace because, in our “blink“ered” world, subtle or complex messages get lost while only simple messages gain traction. Take, for example, the recent USDE report on online learning. The report’s summary messages don’t match its actual content, and its methodology is deeply flawed. But the basic message (online learning is even better than classroom) is getting out there and starting to cause some pushback.

Teachout’s article does not even rise to the level of “Drucker Lite” quality. The ingredients are there, but the article makes a hash of it. “Colleges also sell information?” Redundant Sociology 101 courses are all that stand between the academy and its imminent “structural disintegration?” The drive to cut costs will come to rule higher education policy? Please.

What really bothers me, though, are the possible negative consequences of excessive hype. For example, online education has changed the face of higher education, but has it been “revolutionary” or “radical?” I would argue that it hasn’t. Are the predicted changes greater than the creation of community colleges, the GI Bill, or the growth of private for-profit institutions? If so, how? If not, why all the fuss? I worry that the hype of such pronouncements may actually retard the progress of needed, substantive change; if big changes are afoot, then other needed changes will be overshadowed and ignored.

Here’s what I would really like to see: a deep, reflective examination of what changes are really needed — what would be truly transformational? Ironically, I find more useful material in the reactions to these articles than in the articles themselves. For example, why does a Smith co-ed believe that the “personal touch” is only possible in classroom and campus interactions? (Has she not heard of Facebook?? OMG… ;-) What does “personal touch” actually mean in this context? Why do so many college faculty believe that they have this magic ability to gauge the ‘aha’ moment of all the students in their classrooms? Because as readers’ comments and writers’ reactions show, a myriad of unexamined, deeply held assumptions are out there. At the same time, Drucker and the line of thought he engendered are on to something: change is happening, mostly nibbles around the edges, but there are some serious issues that need to be resolved pretty soon. My bias is that a more thoughtful approach is better. But maybe these articles are a necessary part of the process?

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‘Jam on the American Graduation Initiative’ on Sep. 16

Posted on September 12, 2009 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

On 16 September 2009, from 8:00 am to midnight EST, Knowledge in the Public Interest will sponsor, with LaGuardia Community College as the lead college, Jam on the American Graduation Initiative, an online asynchronous “national conversation” to engage community college leaders, policy makers, and researchers. Convened by the Brookings Institute, The Education Commission of the States, and Jobs for the Future, the focus of the jam will be on President Obama’s recent announcement (see the YouTube video below) to invest $12 billion in America’s community colleges.

The primary topics for discussion will be (1) What we should know—the benefits and consequences—about what the administration is proposing and (2) How we can organize ourselves to make a difference for every community college in the U.S. The purpose of the jam is to influence the discussion on the president’s proposal. The result, according to organizers, will be a “tool kit for action,” which will be available a couple of weeks after the Jam.

The video runs for 29 minutes. The portion on the American Graduation Initiative begins at the 13:30 mark. The president talks about $12 billion in low-interest loans to rebuild and renovate community colleges, and he specifically mentions classrooms and buildings. But at the 25:00 mark, he mentions the electronic infrastructure that opens the door to virtual learning, and he specifically mentions online education for people with day jobs.

Some ETC editors and writers are planning to participate, and they will be sharing their thoughts with ETC readers in a special article that will be updated throughout the day on the 16th. If you aren’t attending but would like to share your thoughts on the proposed topics, please post them as comments to this article.

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‘College for $99 a Month’ – Persons Are Important, Presence Is Not?

Posted on September 7, 2009 by JimS

Lynn ZimmermannBy Lynn Zimmerman
Editor, Teacher Education

Harry Keller wrote in ”Encounters: ‘College for $99 a Month’” that “persons are important; presence is not. It will be a long time before a real, live instructor can be replaced by a machine. However, some of the work traditionally done by instructors can now be done by machines so that teaching becomes more of a mentoring or facilitating job. It becomes elevated to a real person skill.”

As I read Harry’s posts, I realized one thing that has always nagged at me  about some of the discussions about online learning. As I have read some of the various discussions, I have felt that what I consider the human interaction factor is being ignored. As a student and as a teacher, I want to see, hear, feel, even smell the people I am interacting with. After reading Harry’s post, I realized that I am looking through the lens of an instructor who does not teach large lecture style courses, and that I teach courses which are more focused on process than content. I teach classes of 10-25 students and I am a skilled facilitator of these seminar-style classes with groups of students who want to be or are K-12 teachers, people who need to be able to interact effectively face-to-face with other human beings.

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As a student and as a teacher, I want to see, hear, feel, even smell the people I am interacting with.

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However, I can see where a content course with large numbers of students, such as Chemistry 101, would probably be taught more effectively in the online environment. I remember the few large lecture courses I took in college, and I did not perform well in many of them. I would fall asleep or totally zone out. I am sure I would have learned more from a well-designed online course.

However, there’s the rub. John Adsit (‘College for $99 a Month’ – A Step in the Right Direction) referred to schools which are developing high quality online courses. They hire educational theorists who understand how students learn. They hire technology teams to create interactive and engaging multimedia to teach critical concepts. They have project directors who see the whole project through to its conclusion, a process which may take most of a year. They create careful formative and summative assessment programs rarely seen in colleges. A single course costs many tens of thousands of dollars to create.

Unfortunately I don’t think many programs invest the time or money into this kind of design. I have taken online courses which I think were well-designed, and coupled with my self-discipline, I have learned from them, and enjoyed the interaction with other students. I have taken others online courses which were poorly-designed so that I felt more frustration than satisfaction with my learning.

I appreciate the discussion on this topic because I think it really highlights the complexity of the issues that we as modern educators face. I think if we lock ourselves into the idea there is only one modality or one way of delivery we are ignoring the flexibility and versatility that education, with and without technology, can offer.

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Is ‘$99 a Month for College’ Really a Cute Little Kitten?

Posted on September 3, 2009 by JimS

John SenerBy John Sener

In a recent blog post on his Connectivism web site, George Siemens uses the term “cute kitten syndrome” to describe how practitioners commonly treat open education resources — cute, cuddly, beyond reproach — but he offers some constructive criticism anyway.

While reading “College for $99 a Month,” I couldn’t help thinking about cute kittens. Who could be against cut-rate college? We all know how expensive higher education has gotten in the U.S.; the movement to make college more affordable for more people is laudable and much needed. Awww, $99 a month for college, isn’t it cuuuuute? Somebody, though, needs to be thinking about the shots, the litter box, and who’s going to feed it.

Although this is a magazine article with the requisite human interest hooks to heighten reader interest, it’s still a fair question to ask whether or not $99 a month for college, and the business model it implies, really is a cute little kitten in the first place. My take: it is a worthwhile innovation on balance. Catastrophic for universities? This kitten’s got some lumps and warts — the cuteness in this case fades upon closer inspection.

The storyline we’re supposed to absorb appears to be something like this:  the Internet makes cheaper education possible ($99 a month!). Smart innovators are trying to make this happen with the support of eager students and Free Markets. Self-serving faculty and inauthentic, short-sighted accreditors are trying to stop this from happening. But in the long run, consumer choice will win out, and students will learn cheaply! And most everyone will live happily ever after (except for the universities and maybe the accreditors too). The End.

Youngkitten

OK, I don’t want to be too sarcastic here because the article has a lot of good points and some useful information. As a coherent whole, however, I’ve read the thing several times and still can’t make heads or tails of it. The superficial storyline is simple enough to grasp, but its connection to the reality it purports to describe falls apart upon closer examination.

Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of a conglomerate business: freshman lectures, higher education’s equivalent of the classified section.

Where is the evidence that freshman lectures are the most profitable “piece” of the higher education “business?” Is the comparison between freshman lectures and classified advertising apt? Not really.

The most basic mistake here, of course, is trying to view higher education as strictly a business. Yes, they have revenues and costs. But, name another “business” whose customers are also its products, its performers, and its benefactors. Or one which “sells” every unit it “makes” at a loss, i.e., the gap between tuition and actual costs. (OK, besides most Internet companies.)

Beyond that, the comparison to classified advertising is misleading. According to various sources, classified ads accounted for 40% of total newspaper revenue in 2000; that dropped to 25% in 2008. Does tuition from freshmen account for 25-40% of revenue for IHEs? Figures are hard to find, but if we consider that IHEs have multiple sources of revenue (grants, government & foundation funding, partnerships, etc.) and that freshmen only comprise at most 30-35% of the tuition revenue (far less for universities with graduate programs), it doesn’t appear that tuition from freshmen is anywhere near as important to IHEs as classified advertising has been to newspapers.

Is college getting less affordable for more and more students? Absolutely. Do IHEs guard their underclass revenue streams jealously? You bet they do. I know an instructor who taught the exact same course at the local community college and the nearby university. If a student took the course at the community college, the local university refused to accept transfer credit for the course even though it was supposedly a “sister institution.” Stories like these abound and are one of the reasons we are cheering for solutions that effect change. But is freshmen tuition the soft underbelly of the IHE revenue model? Not feelin’ it…

The only expensive thing left in higher education was the labor, the price of hiring a smart, knowledgeable person to help students when only a person would do. And the unique Smarthinking call-center model made that much cheaper, too.

Has the author priced building construction or football uniforms lately? More to the point, what are the labor costs in intro courses where TAs, large class sizes, and community college-level tuition rates abound? There is an important point here: StraighterLine and others (present and future) offer their services as an improved alternative with a lower cost structure.  But the actual reality is rather more complex than the storyline implies.

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Big changes need to happen from without and within, but characterizing the existing structures as simply “artificial barriers” is frankly a bit naive and ultimately counter-productive. We can and must do better than that.

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Where there are cute kittens, there are also usually ugly trolls playing the role of villain and making the kittens look that much cuter. In this article, the ugly trolls are the accrediting agencies:

…the biggest obstacle…was a process called accreditation….And the most prestigious accreditors will only recognize institutions: organizations with academic departments, highly credentialed faculty, bureaucrats, libraries, and all the other pricey accoutrements of the modern university. These things make higher education more expensive, and they’re not necessary if all you want to do is offer standard introductory courses online….The accreditation wall will crumble, as most artificial barriers do.

It’s easy to typecast accreditation agencies as trolls: they’re bureaucracies, they have complex rules and make stupid decisions sometimes. Just get out of the way, you mean accreditation agencies, and let us offer our standard introductory courses in full market freedom! Uh, not so fast. Accrediting agencies are not just “artificial barriers” — they provide tangible and valued benefits (here’s a representative list). “Down with the system!” is just, well, so ’60s and ’70s. Big changes need to happen from without and within, but characterizing the existing structures as simply “artificial barriers” is frankly a bit naive and ultimately counter-productive. We can and must do better than that.

Colleges may have another decade or two, particularly given their regulatory protections. Imagine if Honda, in order to compete in the American market, had been required by federal law to adopt the preestablished labor practices, management structure, dealer network, and vehicle portfolio of General Motors. Imagine further that Honda could only sell cars through GM dealers. Those are essentially the terms that accreditation forces on potential disruptive innovators in higher education today.

Actually, accreditors are more like the EPA in this example. Their policies can be maddening — I waited five years for an EPA-acceptable Smart car to arrive in the US, and then they send us a 40mpg model instead of the 60mpg one? (And of course, we’ll never see a street-legal Smart roadster here.) On the other hand, do we really want hordes of cheap and truly unsafe cars fattening up our traffic death statistics, which is what would happen if there were no EPA regulations?

Likewise, accreditors and their regulations should not somehow disappear from the equation, but accreditors should be looking more closely at alternative models which save students money, and looking very closely at models like StraighterLine. The rest of academe should be too. Is what StraighterLine et al. offer of sufficient quality? If it’s better than 400-person lectures, then why shouldn’t it be acceptable? Are we missing something important by going to the StraighterLine model? If so, should we be looking harder at incorporating it into existing courses? These are good questions to be asking, and I’m glad that StraighterLine is causing enough irritation to bring this issue to greater attention.

In short, we need a less fairytale and more systemic approach to dealing with this situation. Catastrophic for universities? Oops, there goes StraighterLine’s business model along with their clients. Surely Burck Smith and the rest of us can come up with a better, non-catastrophic solution…

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steve_eskow40 Click here to see the response from Steve Eskow.

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‘College for $99 a Month’ – A Step in the Right Direction

Posted on September 3, 2009 by JimS

adsit80By John Adsit
Editor, Curriculum & Instruction

Kevin Carey, in “College for $99 a Month,” refers to Christensen and Horn’s application of the concept of “disruptive innovation” in education, in which they predict that online education will someday acquire the necessary quality to upend the existing system. Is StraighterLine such an innovation? Perhaps not yet, but a closer look at Christensen and Horn coupled with the points in Carey’s article show why it is definitely a step in that direction.

One of the key points that Christensen and Horn make in Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns is that the organization that relies on incumbent technology for its product will struggle to implement the disruptive innovation itself, if it can do it at all. Doing so will require it to devote resources to create an, at first, inferior product to compete against itself in the same market place. A company that competes against itself is torn apart. Carey provides ample evidence of this dynamic at work in the StraighterLine experience with Fort Hayes.

Colleges have indeed implemented online education courses, but for the most part they do so in a way that will not allow true competition. Again, Carey gives ample illustrations of how colleges set rules on online education that limit competition. It is, however, the very structure of colleges that prevents them from creating a truly disruptive innovation in online education. Once again, Christensen and Horn show why.

disrupting_classThey give the example of DEC, a giant in the last era of computing. It defined its corporate structure around the basic design of its very successful computer, creating discrete departments that were assigned the task of upgrading the specific component to which they were assigned. While this meant that DEC could continue to improve that basic design, it also meant that it would be forever locked into that basic design, and new systems built on new interrelationships of parts eventually blew them away. Similarly, colleges and universities that work within existing structures will never create a truly innovative online program.

When a typical college undertakes an online education program, it does so within its existing department structure. This means that individual professors, adhering to the principle of academic freedom, create online versions of their classroom experiences. College teaching is one of the few professions in which practitioners are not required to have any training in their profession, and Carey clearly points out that poor quality college classes and huge lecture halls are all too common. So an online program begins with a professor wondering how to take what is too often a very poor face-to-face instructional model and replicate it in an online setting.

Because the school cannot afford to invest vast sums into a technology that will ultimately compete against itself, the professor is given minimal training in how to use a Course Management System like BlackBoard. The professor has little spare time in which to develop the course, and an inordinate amount of time taken in its creation merely takes away from the amount of money ultimately earned for teaching the course. There is thus no incentive to learn how to use the resources creatively.

______________________________

Colleges and universities that work within existing structures will never create a truly innovative online program.

______________________________

Let’s compare that with an organization that is working outside the existing educational system. At the K-12 level, several, including some cited by Christensen and Horn, are developing high quality online courses. They hire educational theorists who understand how students learn. They hire technology teams to create interactive and engaging multimedia to teach critical concepts. They have project directors who see the whole project through to its conclusion, a process which may take most of a year. They create careful formative and summative assessment programs rarely seen in colleges. A single course costs many tens of thousands of dollars to create.

Of course, such a process would be cost prohibitive within the normal college setting. On the other hand, if such a high quality course is marketed through colleges to students, thus distributing the cost over a wide base, students across the country could have access to an outstanding education at a reasonable cost from any place at any time. Contrary to the beliefs of many, this will not eliminate the need for a quality instructor, for the best of such courses will employ activities that demand the meaningful intervention of a skilled educator. To fill that role, the teaching professor will need to learn to facilitate constructivist, project driven instruction instead of broadcasting facts to the multitudes, but that is a change that should be made anyway.

The existence of programs like StraighterLine show that such innovations are on their way. Predictably, colleges and universities will fight them tooth and nail so that they may maintain their quite profitable status quo, but the change will eventually come.

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Encounters: ‘College for $99 a Month’

Posted on September 3, 2009 by JimS

Encounters: ideas that go bumpIntroduction: This encounter begins with an idea, a “bump,” from Steve Eskow. In an email message on Sep. 2, he referred me to Kevin Carey’s “College for $99 a Month: The Next Generation of Online Education Could Be Great for Students—and Catastrophic for Universities” (Washington Monthly, Sep./Oct. 2009). Carey is policy director of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, D.C. Please participate in this encounter by posting a comment. I’ll append most or all of the comments to this page as they’re published. -js

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keller40Harry Keller, editor, science education, on 3 Sep. 2009, 4:00AM: This article engendered so many thoughts that I cannot begin to write them all. Note the unfair evaluation criteria; compare with online vs. traditonal A.P. science courses. The disruptive innovation thread is large. What if many StraighterLine clones sprung up if regulatory walls were lowered, and many had lower standards — just like today’s colleges. The social benefits to students of college have been ignored in the article. How much of the tutoring and even teaching will be outsourced offshore? Will the $99 per month be sustainable as a business model? StraighterLine only offers 11 courses now, all oriented to business students; when will they be able to offer degrees? Who will support research in renaissance french pottery <big grin> if universities have to downsize? Will future college professors be able to retire on the job until they really retire as some do today? The protesting professors clearly know on which side their bread is buttered and are reacting to a threat rather than proposing rational solutions to impending change. What will happen to low-enrollment courses; will they be aggregated across states or even nations to keep them viable? Who will teach a course that only provides a small slice of $99 per student? How large will the student load per instructor be? Is the ivory-tower model dying? How will drama and science be taught? For online courses, the major costs are the design of the course (amortizable) and the ongoing cost of the instructor. Interestingly, each corporate online provider must design courses anew. Smaller providers, such as small states, purchase the curricula and resell them packaged with one of their instructors.

And so it goes. This concept goes far beyond the use of “clickers” and “smart” boards in bringing technology to education.

The topic may be too large for us to cover, but if we don’t try, we won’t know for sure.

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steve_eskow40Steve Eskow, editor, hybrid vs. virtual issues, on 3 Sep. 2009, 7:14AM: Harry refers to the often-cited “social benefits” of the walled university. Apparently something of educational importance happens when the the 300 students and the lecturer and the images on the screen are together in the lecture hall in real time. Or when the 30 students and the graduate student “discuss” the lecture in real time in a 600-square feet classroom.

Jerry FarberI wish someone in our group with institutional library privileges could get us two articles by Jerry Farber: “The Third Circle; On Education and Distance Learning” and “Teaching and Presence.”

Farber’s first circle is “measurable competence.” That’s what we get in all those studies that come out, it almost seems, every other day. Those “NSD” studies.

The second circle contains those competences that aren’t readily measurable.

And the third circle contains those “benefits” that Harry mentions: the profound educational benefits that Farber and so many other attribute to the face-to-face situation.

The philosophic position behind this “third circle” is often called “the metaphysics of presence,” and this matter of the reality or the mythology of “presence” has, I think, been underreported in the literature of online and mediated and distance learning. ETC could do something about that.

Jacques Derrida wrote much–and densely–about “the metaphysics of presence.” About “logocentrism,” and the power of the Word when present, and , importantly for proponents of mediated instruction, on “phonocentrism,” the assumed differences in impact and meaning of the spoken and the written word.

Perhaps Farber’s articles could help us get a modest shared background on this matter of “presence,” and we might get help from folks in philosophy on Heidegger and Derrida and the implications of “the metaphysics of presence” for the future of online learning.

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Harry Keller (9.3.09, 7:22AM): The social benefits happen outside of the classroom. People make lifelong friends and set up future business relationships. They join clubs that foster success after graduation. I would never suggest (at least from my personal experience) any social benefits from sitting in a classroom.

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Steve Eskow, (9.3.09, 7:32AM): Harry is not talking, then, about “learning” as the curriculum defines it, but about “social capital.” About the so-called “extra-curriculum.”

(When he was President of Princeton Woodrow Wilson wrote extensively about what he called student excitement and involvement in the “sideshows” and their lack of of interest in “the main tent”: the classroom and the curriculum.

Others here and everywhere attribute important learning enhancement and benefits from “presence”: from the living word, from the face-to-faceness of the classroom as opposed to what they see as the “distance” imposed by distance learning: the lack of this almost mystical “presence.”

Farber is one strong voice speaking for this “presence.” Hubert Dreyfus is another.

I don’t think the issue has found its way into distance learning circles, and it’s at the very center of our work, and yet largely unrecognized and unremarked.

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Harry Keller (9.3.09, 8:26AM): Regarding “presence”:

1. I don’t see it. Except for the very unusual show types, having a prof in the room with you gains little or nothing.

2. It’s more useful for the instructor who can gauge the impact of what’s going on by the faces (rapt or blank stares or whatever). Tools available today to online instructors can do even better than face-reading, however.

3. I often had the person who wrote the book (and in one case was writing it daily) giving the lectures. The only advantage to the class was being able to ask questions, but with 180 students, the opportunities to do so were small. Online is better in that respect.

4. Seeing professors out of their element gives little idea of what they really do. However, every first-year student cannot visit the professors as they’re working.

5. Many online students have remarked that they’re cowed in traditional classes but can open up and become involved in online classes.

Persons are important; presence is not. It will be a long time before a real, live instructor can be replaced by a machine. However, some of the work traditionally done by instructors can now be done by machines so that teaching becomes more of a mentoring or facilitating job. It becomes elevated to a real person skill.

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Steve Eskow, (9.3.09, 8:49AM): Harry, it seems increasingly clear to me that many of us heavily involved in mediated instruction are unfamiliar with the large and important literature on this matter of “presence” and “the metaphysics of presence,” and unaware of the role it plays in philosophy and practice–and, importantly for our work, in the serious resistance to distance learning.

An interesting and intricate example of the power of presence thesis is MIT: hardly an enemy of technology and technology-enhanced learning. MIT is increasingly technologizing its instruction–but on campus. As far as I know, complee resistance to distance learning for its students. All MIT credit instruction, as far as I know, requires that you be “present.” On the other hand, distance learning students around the world can make arrangements to access the4 MIT “i-labs” program: lab instruction online.

Hubert Dreyfus is a philosopher who has written such important books as WHAT COMPUTERS CAN’T DO. His book ON THE INTERNET is a serious critique of mediated instruction built around the “presence” thesis.

If we want to engage the important critics of distance learning we need to know more about their position and deep concerns. That means, I think, taking their arguments seriously and engaging with them.

Farber’s articles, and Dreyfus’ ON THE INTERNET would give us a start in developing a common background on the “presence” thesis.

Or: we should know more about it before we attack. It’s serious, substantial stuff–not just anti-technology claptrap.

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Harry Keller (9.3.09, 10:08AM): I’d like to see the gloves come off in the discussion on this topic. Although our view of the future is hazy and dark, we can consider the effects of various futures.

Replacing the sage on the stage with the net mentor has to be a positive step. Loss of a place (secondary school or college) where people gather together ostensibly to learn but really have learning as the secondary purpose, will have repercussions. What are they? Where do those sports teams go? Will the academic part of a college evaporate leaving behind a sports program as its residue? I’m guessing that some alums wouldn’t mind, but the national fraternities and sororities will. Can they have virtual counterparts?

If students can get high school diplomas and college degrees online, they’ll be at home much more putting more of a burden on the parents. Actually going to college exposes many students to other regions and other cultures. When I went to graduate school in New York City, I had never been East of the Mississippi or ridden on a subway or been to a coffee house. I saw a woman’s purse snatched right across the street from me. I saw Jackie Kennedy going to my own drugstore. I saw Robert Preston walking to a rehearsal on a nearly empty Broadway early in the morning. I met Tom Clancy (of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy …) in a bar once. I saw Gene Kruppa practicing his drums in a nightclub in the middle of the day. All of this stuff has nothing to do with classes. It’s the other part of your education.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface here. The implications of StraighterLine are very very far-reaching as are those of the entire online movement.

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Charlie Fitzpatrick

Posted on August 24, 2009 by JimS

[posted 8.24.12]
Charlie Fitzpatrick
Esri Schools Program Manager
2001 N 15th St #1403
Arlington VA 22201
email: cfitzpatrick@esri.com
http://esriurl.com/fitzblog
http://edcommunity.esri.com
http://www.facebook.com/schoolGIS

ETC Publications

Mapping Dragons: Esri 2012 Conferences

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Are Full Teaching Loads the Answer to the Recession?

Posted on August 22, 2009 by JimS

jims80By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

As we tighten our individual and collective belts in the university system where I work, I can’t help but worry about some of the decisions administrators are making to weather the current recession. I’m sharing these concerns in this publication because I sense that the underlying issues transcend the state I live in and weigh heavily in other systems throughout the U.S. and the world.

The decision that has my attention is the insistence on full teaching loads for faculty this fall and elimination of nearly all reassigned time activities. The assumption seems to be that non-instructional activities are expendable. This may be true, but it is not true in all cases. Many activities are actually aimed at exploring and developing innovative ways to accomplish traditional tasks, and in many instances, this involves the use of computer and internet technology. The point is that technology has the potential to cut costs and improve the quality of instruction and services.

The problem with indiscriminately cutting reassigned time funds for those involved in technology activities is that colleges may be simultaneously eliminating the sources of potential solutions and answers. By closing the door on innovation, we may be exacerbating instead of ameliorating the problems caused by the recession.

When I look back on tech-oriented activities that I pursued with reassigned time, I can clearly see the direct relationship between research and cost effective practice.

Like many of you, I’ve been involved in online instruction and college-related projects for many years. I began teaching completely online semester-length classes in spring 1997, over a decade ago, and nearly a decade earlier, in spring 1988, I experimented with a primitive bulletin board system (BBS) in one of my freshman composition classes. This was before the web was more than just an idea. I set up the BBS via a 2400-baud modem connected to an IBM-PC XT with a whopping 10MBs of storage. IIRC, it had the full 640KBs of RAM. The BBS ran off the standard phone lines. I had a 1200-baud modem on my home XT, and the two students who joined me in this experiment had a 300-baud and a 2400-baud modem connected to a Commodore 64 and an XT. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the stream of high-pitched electronic squawk that the modems produced when they made contact.

We hooked the PC-based BBS into a phone line in the college’s study lab and logged in to the board to complete the full cycle of activities for a single assignment that lasted about three weeks. The two students received, as a reward for participating, permission to be absent from class during that period. Despite a steady series of crashes (if anyone in the lab inadvertently picked up the receiver on the phone, the BBS went down), we persevered and were excited about actually teaching and learning online. It was our equivalent to walking on the moon.

For me, the upshot of the experience over twenty years ago was the conviction that completely online instruction was not only possible but cost-effective and potentially highly effective. Still, it took another nine years to convince my department to allow me to teach a fully online course.

The point of this story is that, throughout all these years, I received reassigned time from my instructional duties to pursue these interests. Without the release time, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it. The result, today, is fully online classes and other cost-effective technology, and in the remainder of this essay, I explain the savings that these represent.

Today, at the start of the fall 2009 semester, I find myself for the first time in nearly twenty years with a full teaching load and zero reassigned time. The mandate is from the top down. All instructional faculty are to teach a full load. An exception has been made for a few, for administrative functions, but the vast majority are left with no time to do more than teach. And for community college instructors, a full load is five classes. (In all fairness to the administration, though, I should say that I would have received a release from one of my classes if paperwork had been submitted in time.)

I’m teaching three different writing classes, all of them online: a transfer-level freshman composition class, two advanced expository writing classes, and two creative nonfiction classes. Those who have taught or are teaching fully online classes understand just how much preparation goes into each class. Far more, by a very wide margin, than that for traditional face-to-face (F2F) equivalents.

This teaching load means little time for innovative activities that directly or indirectly impact instruction. As part of my special assignments in the past, I’ve been developing and experimenting with blogs for student assessment and for planning student services. Much of what I’ve been learning about blogs is finding direct application in my online instruction, and, in turn, much of what I’m learning in instruction benefits my other activities.

For instruction, I no longer use the college’s server for course webpages. Instead, I’ve placed all of my course material in blogs that are provided free of charge by WordPress and Google’s Blogger. In this medium, the amount of developing power and speed over the old webpages is staggering. I do use the college’s Sakai CMS, but for its discussion forums and bulk mail services only. My students use Blogger to share their drafts with classmates.

I’ve been developing an online open textbook for my freshman comp class, and for the last year or so my students haven’t had to spend a dime for required texts. I’ve also created electronic journals to publish selected works from students in my advanced expository and creative nonfiction classes. One is already up and running, and the other is about half done. These, too, are based in blogs, and they allow me and the student editors to quickly select, edit, and publish exemplary papers. Publication costs such as printing, special equipment, and office space? None.

The use of web resources, such as blogs, that are off-campus represents a savings that’s difficult to measure. One of the most obvious is the elimination of reliance on college IT personnel to maintain, secure, and instruct users on the technology. Another is the elimination of reliance on the campus’s server resources.

But there are many other cost-saving results that may not be obvious. Instructors and students who learn to use non-campus technology and resources begin to realize that they can accomplish many other tasks with the same technology, thus placing little or no burden on the college in terms of cost or maintenance. Students will be able to use blogs for their other classes and eliminate the need to use the college’s resources to accomplish the same purposes. Staff will learn to use blogs to accomplish web-based tasks that currently require the assistance of the college’s IT staff and resources. This independence that off-campus technology offers can reduce the cost of campus-based technology, and the savings could be put to good use elsewhere.

Other “invisible” cost-savings that derive from the use of technology developed via released time are related to online classes. Online classes don’t require classrooms. If all of my classes were F2F and met twice a week, they would take up ten 75-minute time slots for an entire semester. This impact on the available classrooms is not trivial in terms of dollars and resources. To make the F2F classes viable, they need to be offered at times when students are willing to commute to campus. If rooms aren’t available in these prime times, the classes have to be canceled. Or new classrooms need to be built.

Traditional classrooms require a tremendous amount of electrical power for air-conditioning, lighting, daily maintenance, security, furniture, and equipment. Because writing instruction is heavily tied to the internet, many F2F classes are run in classrooms equipped with computers. The cost of maintaining computer labs and classrooms is absolutely staggering.

Finally, online instructors seldom use campus offices so the college realizes a savings in this regard. Furthermore, online faculty and students don’t drive to campus as often as others so they don’t add to the cost of maintaining parking facilities.

If administrators devote time to examining the full implications of faculty involvement in developing innovative practices through the use of technology, they may not be so quick to order a blanket cut of nearly all reassigned time. They may realize that, in the long run, the new technology may actually help to reduce costs at a rate infinitely greater than the dollar amounts for reassigned time. They may realize that the cost, today, may literally be an investment in the college’s future.

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Encounters: USDE 2009 Report on Effectiveness of Online Learning

Posted on August 17, 2009 by JimS

encounters9Introduction: This encounter begins with a bump from Judith McDaniel (ETC editor, web-based course design), who posted a comment to Steve Eskow re Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Judith_McDaniel2_80Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies (Washington, D.C., 2009), conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development.

After reviewing the excerpts or the complete report, please post your extended comments re the findings. Some or all of the comments will be appended to this article as they are submitted.

Here are some of the key findings:

• Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.

• The observed advantage for online learning in general, and blended learning conditions in particular, is not necessarily rooted in the media used per se and may reflect differences in content, pedagogy and learning time.

• Most of the variations in the way in which different studies implemented online learning did not affect student learning outcomes significantly.

• The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types.

• Studies in which analysts judged the curriculum and instruction to be identical or almost identical in online and face-to-face conditions had smaller effects than those studies where the two conditions varied in terms of multiple aspects of instruction.

• When a study contrasts blended and purely online conditions, student learning is usually comparable across the two conditions.

• Elements such as video or online quizzes do not appear to influence the amount that students learn in online classes.

• Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.

• Providing guidance for learning for groups of students appears less successful than does using such mechanisms with individual learners.

encounters: ideas that go bump

thompson80John Thompson, editor, green computing, on 17 August 2009, at 5:43 am, said:

This discussion on F2F, blended, and online learning reminds me of Matthew Arnold’s quote:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
With nowhere yet to rest my head
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

F2F proponents (right up there with the Luddites supporting print publications against digital encroachment) refuse to acknowledge a broken system. F2F served educational purposes well in another age (in a galaxy far, far away). And while there are still excellent F2F synchronous instructors (e.g., Randy Pausch), by and large the student audience has moved on. This government study merely confirms the obvious — almost anything is as good or even better than F2F instruction, at least as too many F2F instructors practice it. For all intents and purposes, F2F instruction is dead. Yet, online still remains in the wings, albeit with one foot on stage.

encounters: ideas that go bump

keller80Harry Keller, editor, science education, on 17 August 2009, at 7:53 am, said:

I also noted the small coverage of K-12 learning.

I did not see any discussion of the self-selection effect. Students in online or blended learning may have chosen to do so. Such students may be more motivated to do well, on average.

I believe that the instructor remains the key to success. Really good teachers manage to get good results regardless of the surroundings. By providing excellent tools to instructors, we can make the good ones very good. Perhaps, these same tools can help us identify and weed out the poor ones — emphasis on perhaps.

Even if online learning does not, by itself, make learning better, it has and will continue to provide incentives for new ideas in education from which these important new tools will arise.

Of course, as a creator of such a new tool, I have a bias.

encounters: ideas that go bump

jims80Jim Shimabukuro, editor, on 17 August 2009, at 11:15 am, said:

We tend to forget that communication is at the heart of learning, and that schools and classrooms are basically a medium or form of communcation. The problem is that we’ve become so accustomed to the classroom that we no longer view it as a medium of communication but equate it with learning. The danger of this equation is the tendency to dismiss other critical media such as the web.

Another way of viewing this dichotomy is the notion of formal and informal learning. For many educators, the distinction is clear: formal happens in the classroom, and informal, outside. Since the web appears to be clearly “outside” the classroom, it’s informal and irrelevant.

Fortunately, students don’t buy into the belief that learning is limited to what happens in the classroom. They understand, intuitively, that the web is a natural medium for communication and learning, and that the distinctions between formal and informal learning are all too often arbitrary and meaningless.

John Thompson, in his comment above, says, “By and large the student audience has moved on” to online modes of communication. I agree. For them, traditional F2F classrooms are becoming, like telephone landlines, anachronisms, sharing the same fate as typewriters, newspapers, and horse-drawn carriages. The web’s instant, anywhere, anytime communication with anyone or with any information source in the world is a given in their daily lives.

Increasingly, for students today, the question isn’t “Online or F2F?” but “Why limit learning to classrooms?” And increasingly, they’ll want to know, “Why do we have to gather in a classroom for instruction that could be delivered much more effectively and efficiently via the web?”

In their lives outside the classroom, students have become expert at informal learning or learning that’s not guided by an instructor. They use their mobile electronic communication devices to get information instantly on the latest news, entertainment, products and sales. If they need information, they automatically turn to the web simply because it’s there and they have access to it from anywhere at anytime. And more importantly, it’s a way to keep in touch with friends, allowing for the creation of social networking that’s unprecedented. Through the web, they can stay in touch with all their friends 24-7. They’re never more than a few seconds apart, regardless of the physical distances between them.

Replacing some of their F2F class meetings with online activities is a way for educators to acknowledge the undeniable impact of web technology in the lives of their students. This adjustment is considered “blending,” and the result is blended instruction. It seems to be working very well, and many if not most claim that it’s superior to both completely F2F and completely online methods. The USDE report seems to support this contention, but the gap between online and blended is apparently closing.

My concern with the term “blended” is its inclusiveness. It includes such a wide range of practices that it has little or no power to define an actual pedagogy.

Like a storm building at sea, online learning is gradually making its way to landfall, and all indications are that it’s strengthening rather than weakening, and when it hits shore, the impact will change the educational landscape.

The significance of the USDE report is not so much in telling us where we are but in showing us where we’re headed. There’s a trend, and its direction is unmistakable and unavoidable. In the meantime, as Harry Keller says above, “Even if online learning does not, by itself, make learning better, it has and will continue to provide incentives for new ideas in education from which these important new tools will arise.”

The coming years will be exciting, but we can’t really see the dramatic changes that are coming. However, we can read the signs and imagine.

encounters: ideas that go bump

john_sener2_80John Sener, ETC writer, on 17 August 2009, at 10:41 am, said:

There is an inherent danger and limitations to these studies, even meta-analyses such as this one. In particular, the danger is in absorbing the report’s summary findings (e.g., “the use of video and online quizzes…does not appear to enhance learning”) and applying it in a blanket fashion, when in reality the report itself describes findings which indicate that a more nuanced interpretation/response is needed. (Why reports like this one are so schizoid about this is one of the things that bugs me about them.)

For example, the actual language of the report states that the existing research on online quizzes “does not provide evidence that the practice is effective,” which means that:

1) The research does not indicate that the practice of using online quizzes is ineffective either.
2) As the report indicates, each study looked at slightly different things. The above comment was based on very few studies.
3) There are several important but unstated qualifiers. For example, one study found that discussions worked just as well as quizzes; that doesn’t mean that the quizzes weren’t effective.
4) Effectiveness depends on other variables. (Duh!) Interestingly, one study found that one LMS platform was better than another (WebCT vs. IDLE), suggesting that “details of their user interfaces” may have been the key variable in that case. As this example shows, there are LOTS of elements that can explain differences — elements that IMO are impossible to control using (quasi-) experimental designs.

Likewise, the Media Elements section of the report provides clues about possible practices related to using video effectively. For example, the Zhang study “found that the effect of video on learning hinged on the learner’s ability to control the video.” Now, read that sentence juxtaposed with the report’s summary paragraph for this section:

‘In summary, many researchers have hypothesized that the addition of images, graphics, audio, video or some combination would enhance student learning and positively affect achievement. However, the majority of studies to date have found that these media features do not affect learning outcomes significantly.’

Do you see the same disconnect that I do? On one level, this is simply an echo of Clark’s findings from 25+ years ago, as the report itself notes:

“Clark (1983) has cautioned against interpreting studies of instruction in different media as demonstrating an effect for a given medium inasmuch as conditions may vary with respect to a whole set of instructor and content variables.”

On another level, the report’s summary findings do NOT point out significant findings such as the Zhang study because, as one of my colleagues has put it, they are asking the wrong questions. But if you take the summary findings at face value, it’s easy to lose the more important and useful findings such as Zhang’s.

Also IMO, here is the report’s real message:

“That caution applies well to the findings of this meta-analysis, which should not be construed as demonstrating that online learning is superior as a medium. Rather, it is the combination of elements in the treatment conditions, which are likely to include additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration, that has proven effective. The meta-analysis findings do not support simply putting an existing course online, but they do support redesigning instruction to incorporate additional learning opportunities online.”

To me, that means that you’re much better off in looking at the “combination of elements in the treatment conditions” than in taking the report’s summary findings as stated and running with them.

One other important point about this report: it apparently fails to take differences in learning outcomes assessment methods into account. in some cases, they simply report that learning outcomes were the same (or not) without telling us what methods were used. This is a clear yellow flag IMO.

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