On September 14, 2010, after Ning had postponed the deadline for shutting nonpaying networks for the umpteenth time, I wrote:
I will not write another full post about Ning until the non paying groups have been deleted, or Ning gets bought by a more efficient firm, or disappears. But I’ve opened a Ning page on the wiki of ETC Journal where I shall attempt to keep track of what happens at Ning.
And now I am writing one, even though nonpaying groups have not been deleted and no one — to my knowledge — has shown any interest in buying Ning. Motive: a discussion entitled “Deletion of Free Ning Networks?” started by Alex on September 18 in the Ning Creators network. Though it disappeared very quickly, there is a copy archived with WebCite® on the same day: http://webcitation.org/5sq785FZF.
Eric Suesz — senior community manager at Ning — participated in this discussion, stating that “All free Ning Networks are now locked and can’t be accessed.” This is simply untrue. Continue reading →
In Ning’s New Deadline for Pay-Only: Aug. 30, I quoted the announcement of the new deadline set by Ning for paying to keep a network online. It now turns out that creators of Ning networks that won’t do so cannot delete them anymore. In view of this, the following passage in the announcement of the new deadline becomes worrying:
…As a result, we have extended the deadline for selecting one of the three new plans (Ning Mini, Plus and Pro) to August 30, 2010. Beginning on this date, we will block access to any free Ning Network that isn’t subscribed to one of the three plans.
“block access” – and not “delete” – this means that after August 30, Ning will have sole access to, and use of:
the content posted in these networks
the profile data of all members of these networks, which include their e-mail addresses.
Ning sent an e-mail entitled “Important news about your Ning Network” to Ning network owners on July 28, 2010, telling them about three choices that will remain available to them until August 20, 2010: Mini, Plus and Pro.
Ning social networks have been very popular, particularly among educators for whom they meant a free – without ads for K-12 classes – learning environment, with blogs, forums, photo and video galleries, personal pages for members and the possibility to create sub-groups.
But on April 15th, Ning’s new CEO, Jason Rosenthal, announced that they were going to end Ning’s free offer: see Ning Update: Phasing Out Free Services by John McDonald, Ning Creators‘ forum. This is a severe blow, as there is no simple way to back up a Ning network. Continue reading →
The term networking describes the behavioral patterns that people display to gain, maintain and make use of social relationships in a professional context. The relevance of the concept has increased in recent years due to its ascribed positive effects on individual career paths. Online social networking aims to strengthen informal ties, even within formal settings. These informal connections may ease the stress and stiffness of work-related tasks. People who are part of the informal social network provide resources or further contacts, and reciprocal advantages emerge among the networkers. Examples include simplifying workflows (“cutting through the red tape”), passing on strategic information and mentoring network members in their professional development.
Whereas networking traditionally takes place during conference breaks, in the office’s kitchenette or at the water dispenser, nowadays more and more business contacts are established online. “Social Networking once meant going to a social function such as a cocktail party, conference, or business luncheon. Today, much social networking is achieved through Web sites such as MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn” (Roberts & Roach, 2009, pp. 110-111)
For the majority of students the profile in a social networking community is a natural part of their everyday communication portfolio – just as indispensable as the cell phone or e-mail address.
Since student life is to a great and increasing degree mediated through social networking platforms, academic teachers can hardly ignore these environments.
Platforms such as MySpace and Facebook are likely to attract more student attention than the university’s learning management system. These “social” Web portals form a widely accepted virtual meeting point to deal with the social components of campus life.
This new gathering point challenges academic teachers to find a personal strategy for dealing with social networking sites. Should teachers leave the social networking playground to students or should they actively engage in social networking practices to open up a new communication channel with their students? What platforms are out there to choose from, what appeals to their respective target group and what are the prospects and problems of these Web sites?
Examples
In general, all social networking Web sites are used to organize social contacts online. However, networks differ in their character, which depends on the applications offered, the conventions of use and the kind of relationships displayed in the network. Depending on the character of the site, the member profile page highlights specific aspects of the user’s personality and interests and mediates how he or she interacts with other members. For instance, Facebook, which targets mainly students, features a high amount of informal communication and games, differing in this respect from the platform LinkedIn, which is particularly focused on professional contacts and thus features business recommendations and testimonials. There are numerous social networking sites, which differ greatly in their focus and reach. The following examples are either widely used or specifically target an academic audience:
Facebook: Founded in 2004, the platform has 300 million active users per month. Originally, Facebook was accessible for a limited target group. Until September 2006, users needed the e-mail address of a university to register. Still, students are the dominant member group, though other segments are picking up.
LinkedIn: Since its launch in 2003, the network has attracted 50 million users worldwide. The Web site allows registered users to maintain a contacts list with trusted business acquaintances (so called connections). For student supervisors it is a helpful tool to provide recommendations and support graduates entering the job market.
NING: In this Web community, groups can create and manage their own social network. Ning was launched in October 2005 and has more than 1.6 million members. Examples for e-learning related networks are the AACE Connect community organized by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) or the Special Interest Group Evaluation of Learners’ Experiences of E-Learning (ELESIG).
MySpace: Since its launch in 2004, the music community and other interest groups continue to heavily use MySpace. Each month 125 million users worldwide log in to their account, search for songs, bands and tour dates, add contacts and post their own photos and videos. Users may continue to access MySpace for political happenings such as the last presidential election or healthcare bill. A rubric dedicated to education and the organization of school events is MySpace School.
ResearchGATE was founded in May 2008. The platform aims to create an international network of scientists and has been quite successful so far. ResearchGATE has 180,000 members worldwide and grows with a rate of approximately 1000 new member registrations daily. The features are targeted to a scientific audience, for instance, supporting the “self archiving” of publications.
scholarz.net has been in existence since 2007 and has approximately 3000 members. The site is a mixture of citation management tool, search engine and meeting point for scholars. The start-up was originally a research project at the German University of Würzburg. The academic background along with its advertisement free environment adds to the credibility of the site. In the future, their business model foresees member fees.
Prospects
An important part of the university experience is building personal relationship networks. Contacts with fellow students are constantly negotiated, evaluated and maintained collaboratively. Whereas common activities strengthen relationships, inactivity renders them fragile or stagnant at best. Communicating through social networking pages is a means to foster and deepen interpersonal contacts. At this, users are by and large not attracted by the anonymity of the WWW. Despite the potential of global networking, a major amount of contacts maintained through social networks mirrors local binds and relationships to friends, study peers or working colleagues (Livingstone, 2008).
A heavily cited advantage of engaging in social networks goes back to the work and writings of Granovetter (1974). According to the researcher, strong social ties towards friends, neighbors or family members are less relevant for finding a job or choosing a career path than indirect or transient contacts (weak social ties). Social networking platforms make it easier to find indirect connections through visualizing second and third degree contacts. Thereby, one can, with little effort, leverage these contacts and make them a part of one‘s personal network. Plus, the profile page in a social networking site starts to replace the personal homepage. It opens up an easy way to gain experiences in designing Web pages and putting together references and other CV information.
All in all, social networking platforms can be seen as relationship management tools that answer everyday questions of student life. When again is the birthday of my new pal from the introductory course? How can I reach the members of my study group? Short status messages allow for easy navigation in one’s own social network, track activities and keep up to date. Although students use networks such as Facebook chiefly for informal communication, organizing learning activities is in many cases a sidekick to simply having fun.
Problems
The ubiquitous presence of social networking sites in campus life can develop an unwelcomed dynamic. As a matter of principle, the nature and amount of personal information displayed online should be a personal decision by the individual student. But when all fellow students, the tutors and even the teacher meet on facebook, how can one afford to stay behind? Once a member, the student has to cope with the continuous stream of information. Do I have to react to every short message? Should I also become a member in this new learning network? How many online identities can I manage at a time? The pressure and urge to be ubiquitously present and constantly online can turn out to be detrimental to a student’s learning experience.
The unchecked and uncontrollable aggregation of data and the potential for commercial leverage of member profiles are two central points of criticism when it comes to social networking. Different providers follow specific business models, e.g., collecting fees for special services or unlimited storage, advertising general and personalized products based on information in the members’ profiles.
The close interplay between the social networking profile and the person’s relationship management results in a state of dependence towards the provider. What happens when the provider changes the terms of use? Facebook, for example, introduced in 2006 the feature “Newsfeeds.” Many users protested against this decision that created more transparency and awareness of personal information (Boyd, 2008). In the end users can only choose between the two options of accommodating or leaving the platform altogether.
Likewise, the postings and comments of other users, which are displayed within one’s own profile, result in a loss of personal control. Each online identity needs continuous maintenance to be free of spam and other unwanted pictures, games or comments. This upkeep is particularly important since employers increasingly use the Internet for background checks.
Teaching and Learning Scenarios
Coordination: Several academic teachers started using Facebook as a tool for working together with colleagues, tutors, research assistants and students. The short messages and status notifications are ideal for arranging duties and coordinating cooperative tasks. As Sara Dixon from the department of psychology at St. Edward’s University puts it: “It is so fast . . . . They check their facebook profile more often than their email account.” The Creative Writing Network on Facebook is a collection of teaching material shared between academics. As the profile page says: “It’s a place to share book and article titles of craft criticism, announce events related to teaching creative writing, and discuss issues in our field.”
Narration:Brown & Donohue (2007) describe the use of social networking portals in literature studies. When discussing fictional characters in the classroom, a character specific MySpace-profile offers the link to a context students are familiar with: “[…] it can be useful to ask what that character’s MySpace page might look like — what might such a character include in their ‘Interests’ or ‘About Me’ section? The MySpace template offers students a way to talk about identity construction in familiar ways.”
Lectures: The media informatics work group of Prof. Oliver Vornberger from the German University of Osnabrück has developed a plug-in for Facebook called social virtPresenter. It allows the distribution of lecture recordings via the social networking site. This supports social navigation through the lecture contents.
Conclusions
Whether or not academic teachers choose to create personal social networking profiles and the degree to which they make use of it is a personal decision, one that cannot be made unambiguously from a pedagogical point of view. Mazer et al. (2007) researched the influence of teachers’ Facebook profiles on student motivation, learning behavior and learning climate. In addition, students were allowed to comment on how appropriate they perceived the teachers’ Facebook profiles. Despite positive effects on student motivation in the experimental setting, the majority of subjects surveyed reported that an in-depth teacher profile appears to them as “unprofessional.”
Since student life is to a great and increasing degree mediated through social networking platforms, academic teachers can hardly ignore these environments. Knowledge and personal experience can help instructors to facilitate media competence, critical reflection and responsible use of social networking tools among students. Whenever an openly accessible Web site becomes part of the official learning environment, teachers have a certain responsibility for the way students present themselves and interact with each other online. If open social networks are to be used, it makes sense to develop a respective “netiquette.” Furthermore, teachers need to create awareness of privacy settings.
Social networks with an academic focus, such as ResearchGATE or scholarz, offer the advantage of features that are tailored to the target group of researchers and students. They offer options to manage citations, post presentations and articles, and support educational activities. This makes them a good starting point for teachers to get into social networking.
There were three ways in which technology and technology issues were relevant. First of all, as is pretty much the norm in today’s world, email and the Internet were used for the logistics of the conference. The call for proposals was posted online, and it was also emailed to attendees and presenters of previous conferences. The conference was advertised using online technology. Communication with presenters and attendees was online.
Secondly, most of the presentations used a wide range of computer technology, from PowerPoint presentations to DVDs to linking to web sites. For example, my own presentation combined all three. Some of the PowerPoint presentations were fairly straightforward. However, one presenter used an interactive PowerPoint presentation which was quite sophisticated. Again, this type of technology use is not new. It is a rare presentation today that does not use some form of computer technology.
However, the third way in which technology was used and discussed at the conference is what actually prompted me to write this essay. World War II ended 64 years ago. That means that Holocaust survivors are an aging and, frankly, dying population. One of the key questions and concerns at the conference this year was: what do we do when there are no more survivors? Survivor testimony is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools for teaching about the Holocaust. Pictures of the atrocities shock, dismay and disgust, but they are inanimate, as are films, documentaries, and even books. None of them bring the horror of what Hannah Arendt referred to as the banality of evil that was perpetuated as clearly as hearing and talking to a living person who experienced these horrific events. According to Holocaust educators, teaching about the Holocaust should be more than teaching about facts and figures. It should have an emotional impact so that its lessons will not be easily forgotten. The goal of Holocaust education is not merely to inform, but to bring an end to the violence and hatred that bring about genocide and mass killings.
Ephraim Kaye of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem focused his session, titled “Using New Technologies to Study and Teach the Holocaust,” on the various ways that technology can help accomplish these ends (see the bottom of the webpage for a summary of his remarks). Yad Vashem has a range of materials available online. Besides the traditional videos, lessons, and Internet links, they also incorporate YouTube to present material in English, Arabic, and Farsi. Kaye also pointed out that as a result of computerizing survivor names there have been family reunions after decades of separation.
However, Kaye also pointed out technology has a serious downside that can be a challenge for educators. With the advent of the Internet, the proliferation of hate sites and Holocaust denial sites has increased. He states: “This challenge makes it imperative that educators teach students to be savvy and discriminating about the information they access online.” (There are a number of good sites which address information literacy skills, such as this one from Rosemount High School in Rosemount, MN.
However, to return to the original question of what do we do when there are no more survivors, let’s look at what is being done. The US Shoah Institute at the University of Southern California has documented “nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses in 32 languages and from 56 countries.” The US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and many other Holocaust museums around the country have archives of taped survivor testimony. Many Holocaust education websites for teachers, such as The Tennessee Holocaust Commission, have access to survivor testimony.
However, Yad Vashem developed the idea of combining survivor testimony using a documentary style. Rather than merely being the “talking heads” accounts that are the norm, Yad Vashem has attempted to create documentaries with more depth. Survivors are taken back to places, such as their hometowns in Poland, Germany, or the Ukraine, and/or back to the concentration camps where they were incarcerated, and filmed as they walk around and talk about their lives, and how they changed forever during the Holocaust. For many of these survivors, this is the first time they have returned to these places, and hearing them reminisce about their lives and talk about the changes creates a more emotional impact than just hearing someone talk about their life while seated in their living room. The viewer is reminded that this is about a specific human life, not just some person who has no past or no future. One of the critical components of this format is that it “closes the circle” so that the viewer can gain an understanding of the survivor’s whole life experience.
For Holocaust educators, modern computer technology provides ways that can give depth and breadth to this difficult topic. Not only can we access archives and documents of historical and current events related to the Holocaust, modern technology provides educators and students ways to connect with others that were unthought of just a few years ago. For example, the Maine Holocaust Education Network maintains a Ning that has a link to the US Holocasut Museum Twitter Feed.
Introduction: 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 problem 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
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?
A 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.
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. Bonnie 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?
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.
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.
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. Harry 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.
[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.
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(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.
The 21st annualWorld Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications(ED-MEDIA) attracted 1200 participants from 65 countries. A diverse crowd, including K-12 teachers, university faculty members, researchers, software developers, instructional designers, administrators and multimedia authors, came together at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel from the 22nd to 26th of June with a common goal: to share the latest ideas on e-learning and e-teaching in various educational settings and at the same time enjoy the aloha spirit of tropical Oahu, Hawaii.
Organized by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), the annual conference takes place at varying locations in the US, Europe and Canada. Thanks to funding by the German Academic Exchange Agency, I was able to join my colleagues in Hawaii to present two current research projects on social tagging and blended learning and en passant absorb the international flair and information overflow that go together with a packed conference program.
The attendees experienced a full program. In addition to various invited lectures, 210 full papers and 235 brief papers were presented, complemented by numerous symposiums, round tables, workshops and an extensive poster session. The conference proves to be exceedingly competitive with an acceptance ratio for full paper submissions of 37%, and 56% for brief papers. Eleven submissions were honored with an outstanding paper award. My favorite was the work of Grace Lin and Curt Bonk on the community Wikibooks, which can be downloaded from their project page.
Beginning with Hawaiian chants to welcome the participants at the official conference opening and the local adage that “the voice is the highest gift we can give to other people,” audio learning and sonic media formed a recurring topic. The keynote of Tara Brabazon challenged the widely held perception that “more media are always better media” and argued for carefully developed sonic material as a motivating learning format. She illustrated her point with examples and evaluation results from a course on methods of media research (see YouTube excerpt below). Case study reports from George Washington University and Chicago’s DePaul University on iTunesU raised questions about the integration into learning management systems, single-sign-on-procedures and access management.
Among the invited lectures, I was particularly interested in the contribution of New York Times reporter Alex Wright, who reflected upon the history of hypertext. The author’s web site offers further information on The Web that Wasn’t. Alan Levine, vice-president of the Austin based New Media Consortium, clearly was the darling of the audience. Unfortunately, his talk took place in parallel to my own presentation on social tagging, but Alan has created a web site with his slides and hyperlink collection that gives a vivid overview on “50+ Web 2.0 ways to tell a story.”
A leitmotif of several keynotes was the conflict between open constructivist learning environments on one side versus instructional design models and design principles derived from cognitive psychology on the other. Stephen Downes advocated the learning paradigm of connectivism and praised self-organized learning networks that provide, share, re-use and re-arrange content. For those interested in further information on connectivism, an open content class starts in August 2009. This radical turn to free flowing, egalitarian knowledge networks was not a palatable idea for everyone. As an antagonist to Downes, David Merrill presented his “Pebble in the Pond” instructional design model that — similar to “ADDIE” (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) — foresees clear steps and predictable learning outcomes. Tom Reeves, in turn, dedicated his keynote to a comprehensive criticism of multimedia principles derived from the cognitive load theory, picking up on an article by Kirschner, Sweller & Clark (2006), “Why Minimal Guidance Does Not Work . . . .” The audience, in particular the practitioners, reacted to this debate true to the Goethe verse “Prophet left, prophet right, the world child in the middle.” As Steve Swithenby, director of the Centre for Open Learning of Mathematics at Open University (UK) posted in the ED-MEDIA blog: “Well, actually, I want to do both and everything in between. I can’t see that either is the pattern for future learning – both are part of the ways in which learning will occur.”
With blog, twitter feed, flickr group and ning community, the conference was ringing with a many-voiced orchestra of social software tools. Gary Marks, member of the AACE international headquarters and initiator of the new ED-MEDIA community site, announced that he has planned several activities to foster interaction. So far, however, the few contributions are dedicated to potential leisure activities on Hawaii. The presentation “Who We Are” by Xavier Ochoa, Gonzalo Méndez, and Erik Duval offered a review on existing community ties of ED-MEDIA through a content analysis of paper submissions from the last 10 years. An interactive representation of the results is available online.
Twitter seems to have developed into a ubiquitous companion of conference talks. Whether the short messages add to the academic discourse and democratize ex cathedra lectures or divert the attention from the presenter, replacing substance with senseless character strings, is a controversial discussion. Accordingly, twitter received mixed responses among the conference attendees and presenters. In the end, 180 users joined the collective micro-blogging and produced approximately 2500 postings — an overview may be found at Twapper. As a follow-up to this year’s ED-MEDIA, participants were invited to take part in an online survey, designed by the Austrian/German twitter research duo Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt. The results will hopefully further the understanding of the pros and cons of integrating microblogging in e-learning conference events.
The AACE used ED-MEDIA as an occasion to announce plans for future growth. Already responsible for three of the largest world-wide conferences on teaching and learning (ED-MEDIA, E-LEARN and SITE), the organization extends its catalog with two new formats. A virtual conference called GlobalTime will make its debut in February 2011. Additionally, the new face-to-face conference GlobalLearn targets the Asian and Pacific regions.
Is ED-MEDIA worth a visit? The sheer size of the event leads to a great breadth of topics, which often obstructs an in-depth discussion of specific issues. At the same time, there is no better way to gain an overview of multiple current trends in compact form. Another plus, all AACE conference contributions are accessible online through the Education and Information Technology Library. The next ED-MEDIA will take place in Toronto, Canada, from June 28 to July 2, 2010.
There is a wide variety of hardware and software available for teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) and of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Even though the contexts between the two types of teaching/learning are different, the motivations are the same. Teachers and students want and need access to techniques and strategies that effectively teach English. Depending on the specific context, the teachers and students may have more or less access to various types of technology.
Before we go any further, for those of you who are not familiar with this field, I will define ESL and EFL. The ESL teacher is teaching English in an English immersion context. The students are learning English in an environment where English is the primary language spoken, such as the US or Australia. The EFL teacher is teaching English as a Foreign Language in an environment where some other language (or languages) is primary, such as in France or Taiwan.
As I stated earlier, context often determines the type and amount of technology that is available. For example, ESL teachers who teach adults in American community colleges also often incorporate teaching computer skills into their classes. A teacher in an online program, whether ESL or EFL, uses a variety of web technologies for his/her class, which may include Skype, Ning, or other such online tools. A teacher in Peru may not have classroom access to a computer, but have access at home so that she/he can find lesson ideas online to use in class.
I decided to interview several ESL/EFL teachers to find out how they use technology, especially computer-based technology, in their classes, and I will start with myself. I do not usually teach English, but this semester, spring 2009, I am teaching EFL to university students in Poland who are studying to be English teachers. There is a computer with Internet access in the teachers’ office and I have my own laptop and Internet access at home, so I can reproduce and create classroom materials. One classroom where I teach has a computer and projector for showing DVDs and PowerPoints. Therefore, I have been able to integrate some computer-based technology into lessons. Most of my students have regular access to computer-based technology and use it regularly, so, besides my own use of the computer for presentations and the Internet for gathering materials, I set up a Ning so students could engage in a couple of online discussions.
In addition to classroom teaching, I have been tutoring a woman in another country using Skype, and I also email her occasional homework assignments. Since she only has access to a computer at work, we talk during her lunch break about once a week. I often use the chat feature to type a correction as she is speaking, so I do not interrupt her flow. Her spoken English is quite fluid, and, because of the slight lag in Skype, I have found that if I correct her verbally, it is more disruptive than when I type her the note. She can look at the note when she pauses and can then ask me about it or repeat it as necessary. I also use the text function sometimes to give her the phonetic spelling of a word or to write a phrase out for her. Combining these two functions has worked well for us.
Even though I am not an English teacher, I meet them through conferences, online courses and workshops, and the invisible network that English teachers seem to have. I decided it would be interesting to see how some of my colleagues in different English teaching environments use technology in their classes. The following comes from interviews with two of them.
Australia, Adult Intermediate ESL
Teacher A told me that she has “been involved in teaching ESL with computers since 1995, starting with using ESL programs in a computer lab.” She said that she learned very quickly that she needed to upgrade her computer skills “and since that time,” she said, “I haven’t stopped doing that, formally and informally. Formally I’ve done many computer-related courses, including a Graduate Certificate in Multimedia, Certificate III in IT, and Masters in Education (Computers in Education). Informally, though, I haven’t stopped, being involved with CoP Webheads in Action for quite a few years.” Since 1999, she has also trained ESL teachers in her college in the use of computer technology.
She then went on to tell me how her use of computer technology has evolved. “I’ve tried using various applications,” she said, “through MS Office, ESL programs, blogging, wikis, and IWBs [interactive whiteboards]. Each of them has been useful for different purpose and audience.” In an attempt to maintain a paperless classroom almost everything is set up so that it is done on the computer, including grammar exercises, reading activities, and listening activities. Over her years of teaching English using technology, she has found that hands-on activities, either individual (in the computer lab) or individual/group with Smartboard have been effective.
In her present class she has access to a wide range of technology. She uses an interactive white board for web-based and Notebook (Smartboard proprietary software) interactive exercises. These activities can also incorporate audio and video, so she often uses a camera to take photos and short videos to enhance her lessons. She also has access to a Student Response System (clickers) that she uses for tests and other assessments. Teacher A also relies on email to stay in contact with students and has found that wikis are useful for developing and posting class programs, files, and links. They are especially helpful for students who are absent to keep up with what is happening in class.
However on the downside, she has found that technology is not always an effective learning tool for some of her students for a variety of reasons. One form of technology which she has found problematic with her students is SMS (text messaging). She stated that the English they have learned through this medium is a different kind of English and that once students learn it, it is difficult to unteach.
She has also learned that student blogs require too much time for many of these students so that they do not do them at home and have too little in-class time for them. She said that the students in her present evening class are a mixture of young and old people (21 to 50), long-term residents and new migrants (from 3 to 23 years in the country). They either come to class after work or after swapping childcare duties with their husbands. Most of them have no energy or time to study at home, let alone to use the computer (often occupied by younger generation). Only a few students in her class check the class website/wiki.
United States, College-Level Academic ESL Writing
Teacher B originally told me that she doesn’t use technology much in her classes, but I encouraged her to talk to me anyway. She said that one reason she doesn’t use technology much is that she has “an incompetence complex.” Then she went on to say, “Ironically, I run my school’s computer lab.”
She said that another reason she does not use technology a lot is that she thinks it can be overused. She found that, because young people “feel comfortable with this low-context, people unfriendly medium,” they will often overuse it and ignore other ways of interaction. She gave an example of teaching students irregular verbs with flashcards. Most were not interested. However, when they discovered an online irregular verb quiz, they were eager to participate. Her comment was that “they obviously prefer the impersonal to the personal.” She thinks that this type of interaction “does not include important human contextual clues during discourse” and is concerned that the development of interpersonal communication skills will suffer as a consequence.
However, do not get the idea that Teacher B is a technophobe. She uses the ELMO document camera with a Smart Board to display papers for group discussion and uses audio equipment to play Jazz Chants, rhythmic chants for teaching English pronunciation and stress. She said that she likes “to refer students to on-line exercises, but it takes a lot of time to find good matches for each student.” She also encourages use of the computer lab for independent reading comprehension work using the Kenmei Internet Reading Lab.
Teacher B also uses other technology with her students, but she thinks it should be moderated and mediated by the teacher. For example, she likes to use Pronunciation Power software, but she commented that “It is useless if used unmonitored, and that is the way it is promoted!” In the fall semester she is planning an inductive grammar activity for her students using an online corpus, which she believes will help them improve their writing.
During this Spring 2009 semester, I am teaching at a major university in a large city in Poland. My students are 3rd, 4th , and 5th year students , most of whom plan to be English teachers. Technology is playing a role in this experience in some expected and unexpected ways.
First of all, I have easy access to the folks back home. I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Poland from 1992-1994 and, during that time, the communications infrastructure was rudimentary. Many people did not have telephones, myself included. The couple of times I called my mother in the U.S. I had to go to the post office and order the call. Then I had to wait until the overseas operator was able to connect to me. When I returned to Poland in 2000 the cell phone boom had occurred, and Internet service was on its heels. Now with Skype and IM and all the other communication devices at our fingertips, it is almost as though I never left home. This easy accessibility is actually a mixed blessing. The chair of my department has been able to give me tasks to do, even though I am several thousands of miles away.
Although I travel quite a bit and try to journal, I am rarely successful keeping up the journaling process. This time, I decided to set up a “private” social network on Ning (www.ning.com) for my friends. I recorded a video about my impending trip. I put up links to my Polish university and other interesting places. I have been posting pictures of my adventures and have written blogs to keep my friends informed. I think that having an audience other than myself is helping me keep up the process.
On the downside has been the lack of technology available to my students here. The building where I teach has one lecture room, reserved only for large lecture classes, that has a computer and projector, but no Internet access. The technology guy here did show me how to download some clips that I was planning to use from YouTube (using mediaconverter.org), so I was able to work around the no Internet access issue. I have one class of about 40 students and that is the only one allowed to use that room. Unfortunately this week when I was planning to show a DVD and a YouTube clip, the system was not functioning. For my other classes, I have had to re-think how I teach them, taking into account that I would not be able to use the videos and PowerPoints that I usually use with my classes.
Another issue that arose is that none of my students have ever done an online discussion. I use online discussions once or twice a semester when I have to go to a conference. The university here does not have a built-in classroom management system like WebCT or Blackboard, so I set up a discussion on Ning. Because I did not have Internet access in the classroom, I had to take “snapshots” of the screens to show the students what to do. (The computer system was functioning that day.) Then I had to deal with the students’ anxiety about doing this activity. Most of the students participated, and I must say that the ones who did participate did a really good job, better than many of my students in the US. However, another professor has referred several times to the week I “missed” class. She obviously has no idea of how time-intensive setting up and conducting an online discussion is for the teacher or the students.
On the other hand, I was recently at a symposium in another part of Poland and technology, including Internet access, was available in many classrooms. This particular university also specializes in providing services for students with vision and hearing disabilities. They have special adaptive equipment in several classrooms to aid these students’ learning.
So far I have experienced the advantages of technology for staying in touch as well as the challenges it poses when there is little or no access in the classroom. I feel a little bit like I have fallen into Dean McLaughlin’s short novel, Hawk Among the Sparrows (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/dean-mclaughlin/hawk-among-sparrows.htm), which is about a pilot in a modern fighter jet with nuclear missiles and technological guidance systems who goes through a time warp to World War I. None of his highly sophisticated weaponry will work in this low-tech time period so that, in the end, the only way he can be effective is to use his jet as a projectile and crash into the enemy’s installation. I certainly hope that is not my fate!
Harry Keller: "I read that the virus can remain viable on hard surfaces for as long as 12 hours. " ("My Life in LA County During COVID-19: March 22"). Harry Keller: "People are working feverishly on [COVID-19] cures and vaccines. Until they arrive, we might as well be in the world a century ago" ("My Life in LA County During COVID-19: March 20").
John Mark Walker: "If educational communities can continue to push platform integration and content portability, in the future, students may be able to design their own personalized degrees from smaller, modular chunks that cross institutional barriers" ("MOOCs Are Dead. Long Live MOOCs!"). Richard Koubek, provost of LSU Baton Rouge: “Our vision is LSU, anywhere, anytime, and that physical boundaries would not define the boundaries of this campus.... You’re not going to get there incrementally. You have to change the paradigm” ("Successful Online Programs Require a Paradigm Shift"). Bryan A. Upshaw: "Most teachers already have the resources to videoconference. If they have a smartphone, tablet, or computer, then they probably have everything they need!" ("Bring the World to Your Classroom: Videoconferencing").
Judith McDaniel: "The nature of online education is that it removes me, the instructor, from the center of the learning process and allows the students to learn from me and from one another" ("Creating Community: Part 3 – Hard Conversations in an Online Classroom – Heart of Darkness").
Tim Fraser-Bumatay: "Although the format leaves us far-removed physically, the online forum has its own sense of intimacy" (Judith McDaniel, "Creating Community: Part 3 – Hard Conversations in an Online Classroom – Heart of Darkness").
Ryan Kelly: "For me to be able to work with people clear across the country for an extended period of time opened me up to new things" (Judith McDaniel, "Creating Community in an Online Classroom: Part 1 – Getting to Know You").
Daniel Herrera: "As a Mexican American, I know that words of identity are powerful; so to discuss white privilege with my professor and classmates in a face-to-face class would have been terrifying and impossible" (Judith McDaniel, "Creating Community: Part 2 – Hard Conversations in an Online Classroom – Othello"). Camille Funk: "Instructional design is an emerging profession and in the midst of a renaissance. There is a need to structure and develop this growing field" (Stefanie Panke, "New Instructional Design Association in Higher Ed: An Interview with Camille Funk").
JD Pirtle: "Coding is learning to create and harness the power of machines, both near and far.... But coding isn’t really about machines, programming languages, or networks—it’s about learning new and powerful ways to think" (Stefanie Panke, "Wearable Tech on Your Preschooler? Technology Education and Innovation for Children").
John Wasko: "Here is the great thing. You don’t need any special set up or call center or anything like that. Just a smartphone. I use an iPhone 4. Works great. If we can develop mobile techniques to help these students, every university will knock on their door" (Lynn Zimmerman, "Social Media in TESOL: An Interview with John Wasko"). .
Katie Paciga: "It’s always better to use the technology to accomplish meaningful, child-centered goals related to communication — to consume information, to create new messages, and to communicate those messages to others" (Lynn Zimmerman, "Technology in Early Education: An Interview with Katie Paciga"). Lee Shulman: Whereas the traditional approach aims to achieve generalized findings and principles that are not limited to the particulars of setting, participants, place and time, the SoTL community seeks to describe, explain and evaluate the relationships among intentions, actions and consequences in a carefully recounted local situation (summary by Stefanie Panke in "ISSOTL 2013: ‘Doing SoTL Means You Never Have to Say You’re Sorry!’").
Jesse Stommel: "The course (and its participants) inspired our thinking about MOOCification, which basically means leveraging the best pedagogies of MOOCs in our on-ground and small-format online courses and laying the rest to waste."
Sean Michael Morris: "The MOOC has become something manageable, something we we can mine for data, and something that simply isn’t — and never was — all that innovative" (MOOC MOOC! The interview by Jessica Knott).
Curtis P. Ho: "The challenge will be to create and implement authentic learning in an online course. How authentic can learning be if we are confining it to a 15-week semester at a distance?" (A Conversation with Curtis Ho: AACE E-Learn SIG on Designing, Developing and Assessing E-Learning by Stefanie Panke.
Tom Evans: "We are ... using this MOOCulus platform as a learning tool for students taking Calculus at Ohio State.... However, any student, anywhere, can access MOOCulus, anytime, by logging into the site using their Google ID" (MOOCulus for Calculus Fun: An Interview with Tom Evans by Jess Knott).
Curt Bonk: “Today, anyone can learn anything from anyone at any time." "Students want feedback on everything they do. You know what happens when you give feedback on everything they do? You die” (Stone Soup with Curt Bonk: Armchair Indiana Jones in Action by Stefanie Panke). Daniel McGee: "Successful [Calculus I] students appeared to need a unified approach, which emphasized verbal situations, geometric figures, algebraic expressions and the relations between them" (Study Suggests the Need for an Intergrated Learning Styles Approach to Calculus by Jessica Knott).
Kathlyen Harrison and Michael Gilmartin: "We highly recommend [Triptico] for teachers that want to improve interactivity, foster competition, and engage students in the learning process" (Triptico: A Powerful and Free Instructional App).
Bert Kimura: "If paper and pencil testing is absolutely required in a class, it probably shouldn’t be offered as a DE class. Not today anyway" (Remote Proctoring: More Questions Than Answers). Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (How Will Traditional Leaders Fare in the Wave of Open Courses?) Janet Buckenmeyer: "It takes more time to design and develop the [online] course. It takes more time to monitor students in an online course.... How are faculty compensated in terms of workload and pay for the additional work an online course requires? How many students should be placed in an online course?" (A Talk with Janet Buckenmeyer on Issues in Online Course Development, by Lynn Zimmerman). Billy Sichone: "My phone has been a valuable asset as I can check the internet for information at any and every time. For instance, I once took an international trip to two countries in a row and the phone was my only source of assignment submissions etc. I did not miss out at all" (A Student’s View of an Open University: An Interview with Billy Sichone, by Stefanie Panke). Julia Kaltenbeck: "Seek ways to build and maintain your community! The community is the single most important success factor in crowdfunding and social payments. To put it simply: No community, no funding" (Julia Kaltenbeck: How Crowdfunding and Social Payments Can Finance OER, by Stefanie Panke). Jessica Ledbetter:
"What keeps me going is that I’m actually creating things I might not find the time to do otherwise. It’s nice to be able to learn with others and see what they’re doing. I always learn by looking at others’ code" (Open Learning at P2PU: An Interview with Jessica Ledbetter, by Stefanie Panke). Susan Murphy: "We are all so afraid that we're going to miss out on something, so we just skim and scan and re-post without really taking time to consider the source. We sometimes forget that there are real people behind the avatars. And that it's worth getting to know more about them" (The Human Face of Twitter: An Interview with Susan Murphy, by Jessica Knott). Jessica Knott: "While a lot of these younger students are pretty gung ho to go forth and innovate technologically, they will be stymied in many cases by an aging infrastructure and restrictive technology rules. Perhaps even by the culture of co-workers who discourage them from using tech in their teaching" (An Interview with Jessica Knott: Teaching an Online Class on Course Development). Emily Hixon: "If a teacher thinks that she/he is going to be able to talk 'at' students and they will learn, she is mistaken. Teachers must be prepared to engage students and use technology to support an interactive, meaningful approach to learning" (Integration of Pedagogy and Technology in Teacher Education: An Interview with Emily Hixon, by Lynn Zimmerman). Parry Aftab: "Unless we can make the technology safer and provide the right skills to use it responsibly and teach cyber-self-defense, we can’t expect students to use it, enjoy it or benefit from it. We owe it to the kids" (Bonnie Bracey Sutton, "Cyberbullying: An Interview with Parry Aftab"). Nancy Willard: "It sure does not help us in transitioning to Web 2.0 if the news is that cyberbullying is at an epidemic level. But it isn’t. And my approach will demonstrate the positive norms of students, which should also translate to greater willingness to also use these technologies for instruction" (Bonnie Bracey Sutton, "Cyberbullying: An Interview with Nancy Willard").
Marc Prensky: "Instead of just spending, and often wasting, billions of dollars to create things that are new, let’s try harder to fix what we have that’s already in place" (Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools). Spotlight Archives
By Claude Almansi
John Mark Walker: "If educational communities can continue to push platform integration and content portability, in the future, students may be able to design their own personalized degrees from smaller, modular chunks that cross institutional barriers" (
Richard Koubek
Judith McDaniel
Tim Fraser-Bumatay: "Although the format leaves us far-removed physically, the online forum has its own sense of intimacy" (Judith McDaniel, "
Ryan Kelly: "For me to be able to work with people clear across the country for an extended period of time opened me up to new things" (Judith McDaniel, "
Daniel Herrera: "As a Mexican American, I know that words of identity are powerful; so to discuss white privilege with my professor and classmates in a face-to-face class would have been terrifying and impossible" (Judith McDaniel, "
Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (
Educational Technology and Change Journal 
