Yet Again

The best part of the teaching year is this few weeks between the holiday hoopla and the start of new classes.  As the new year rolls wayyy out in front of me, there is new air to breath, new students to anticipate and new ideas for my classes to contemplate.  Not so long as the summer months that one gets lost in distraction and loses focus, the prospect of courses needing attention in the near future keeps them bubbling gently on the back burners of thought.

This month, I''m preparing two new fully online courses for a new program at our campus -- ELOISE.  It is the first offering that the campus will have for pre-collegiate English students to take courses fully online (we have had hybrid courses for them for some time).  The English course is paired with a Human Development (college success) course and I'm teaching both.

I've had enough experience teaching English courses online to feel fairly comfortable about how to get started with that, but teaching HDEV for the first time AND doing so online has me churning out "what if?" ideas all day long.  With the opening week looming, I need to start making firm decisions--this, not that!  Although it is making me a little crazy, it's an exhilarated crazy, crazy in a good, good way.  Happy new semester, everyone!

Digital Literacy

My English 1 Composition students are creating a web-based research project. I'm finding that many students lack digital skills as well as research skills, so that has me thinking about a huge gap we may have in curriculum. Here is a list of skills that Maria Andersen suggested as necessary in her blog, Teaching College Math: 



Basic Web Stuff
1. Basics of HTML (bold, underline, italics, special characters)
2. How to use EMBED code or make a live link
3. How to make and share a screenshot
4. How to make and share a short video explaining something or asking for help
5. Learn basic abbreviations and emoticons (e.g. ROFL, IMHO)
6. How to build a landing page for your web-based stuff (e.g. iGoogle, NetVibes)
7. How to add gadgets or plug-ins for various sites
8. How to make a simple website (e.g. Google Sites)
9. Build a clickable resume / digital portfolio
10. How (and when) to use collaborative documents or spreadsheets
11. How (and why) to create tags and labels
12. How (and why) to use URL-shortening sites (e.g. TinyURL)
Organization
13. How to set up a web-based calendar and use it to manage your time
14. How to set up and manage an RSS reader
15. How to find a common meeting time (e.g. Doodle)
16. How to set up a communication aggregator (e.g. Digsby, Trillian, TweetDeck)
Communication
17. How to manage email
18. How to write a good “first-contact” email
19. How to write a good subject line
20. How to write a good email response
21. Texting etiquette (when it’s appropriate, when it’s not)
22. How to summarize your thoughts in 140 characters or less
23. How to use Twitter (reply, retweet, direct message)
24. How to determine whether you should share it in a public forum (will it affect your future job prospects, your current employment, etc.)
25. How to manage an online meeting
26. How to give an effective webinar
27. What are the differences between various social networks and how they are used? (e.g. Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn)
Finding and Managing Information
28. How to use web-based bookmarks
29. How (and when) to use library search databases
30. How (and when) to use an image-based search engine
31. How (and when) to use alternate search engines (e.g. Clusty)
32. Who writes Wikipedia articles and when can they be trusted?
33. How to build a custom search engine
34. When can you trust the information you find?
35. How to use article citations to find better references
36. How to manage a bibliography online (e.g. Zotero)
37. How to set up web alerts to track new information (e.g. Google Alerts)
Privacy, Security, and the Law
38. Creative Commons – what is it and how to choose appropriate license?
39. How to read the legalese that tells you who owns it after it is shared online
40. What should you share and how does that change for different audiences?
41. How to manage usernames & passwords
42. How to find and tweak the privacy settings in common social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter)
43. How do data-mining sites get your information? (e.g. participating in FB quizzes)
44. What are the security concerns with GPS-based tracking systems?
Presentation
45. How to determine the audience and appropriate length for your presentation
46. Good presentation design principles
47. Principles of storytelling
48. How to share a set of slides on the Internet
49. How to build a non-linear presentation
50. How to build a flashy presentation (and when to use it)
51. How to find high-quality images that can be used in presentations (with appropriate copyrights)
52. How to find audio that can be shared in a presentation (with appropriate copyrights)
53. How to create a captioning script for a video
54. Ways to caption an internet-based video
55. How (and when) to use a virtual magnifier with your presentation
Ways to Learn
56. How to build an interactive mindmap to organize ideas
57. How to use a blog to track your learning process
58. How to find good sites, blogs, and other online publications for the topic you are learning about
59. How to cultivate a personal learning network (PLN)
60. How to participate in a live learning chat (e.g. TweetChats)

All of this makes me think about cars.

When they were first invented, lots of people understood the rudiments of how they worked and could make simple repairs.  As they became more technologically advanced (and arguably more dependable), there was less need to understand the inner workings--put in a little gas, run it through the jiffy-lube once in a while and go.   Generations born long after the advent of the automobile thought less about how it worked and just used their cars.

Perhaps the same will be true with computer technology.  Those of us born before computers and who were interested enough in them, learned BASIC and DOS and figured out how to tinker when things didn't work.  When the web was born, we learned enough HTML to be dangerous and gladly gave it up for web editing programs.  But all those experiences gave us a shade-tree mechanic's perspective about working in a digital age.

My students, on the other hand, just want to turn on the machine and have it GO.  There is not much interest in learning how to make a web page, how to get under the hood and tinker.  Case in point, when a student raised the question about how to create the basic web page for their projects, I found that almost none of them had created one from scratch, but almost ALL of them had either a blog of a Facebook page on which they happily created a web presence without knowing it.

Thinking about Maria's list, I wonder if we can teach the concepts quickly enough as the technological landscape continuously shifts underneath us.  And I wonder if these concepts will even be relevant in another two years.

Keeping Up

That's the challenge, isn't it? In this video, the statistics are mind-blowing (especially the idea that we'll have computers in blood cells in twenty years). When I think about the changes that have happened in the span of twenty years, it leaves me breathless. Yet my students, who have arrived in this world-already-created, are, of course, oblivious. Their bemusement at my "gee, wow!" of it all will likely give way to their own amazement twenty years hence, don't you think?

Birthdays

It's celebration time for the internet. On September 24, 1979, the bare-bones version of CompuServe was launched. Here's an early ad:

And if that doesn't completely crack you up by the "gee-whiz" of it all, this will:

Doesn't it seem like there's ALWAYS been the internet? As someone who can remember life pre-internet (even pre-TV!), anniversaries like this stop me in my tracks to take a look back and try to remember what it was like to not have every bit and byte of information at my fingertips.

Today, Google celebrates its 11th birthday (cute logo!) and as a lover of all things Google (who better to take over the world?), I'm again stunned to remember that there hasn't always been Google--and that it's only 11 years old!!!!! Really, what did we do before all of this?????

So, Happy Birthday, Internet! Can't wait to see what you bring in 11 more years.

Looking back...and looking forward

One thing that is becoming clear in the year I've had to consider and reconsider online teaching and learning is that we are too often slow to see the benefits of a changing techno-landscape. Worried that laptops "interfere" with learning (or not paying enough attention to the sage on the stage), teachers insist that they be turned off during classtime. So worried about the trouble students might get into by surfing the web, we used to limit computers in labs to "real" work only--word-processing. Looking back, how short-sighted and silly that seems!

I think the same thing will be said in the not-too-distant future about the use/abuse of cell phones in class. Rather than seeing them as evil devices that interupt or pull students from the assignment at hand, could we not embrace them as learning devices?

Here's a cool tool to help with that. Poll Everywhere makes everyone's cellphone a clicker device. I've been mightily entertained by the use of clicker technology in conferences, but haven't thought seriously about using them in the classroom because of prohibitive costs. They are a bit of coolness that has some application for my work, but not so much as to warrant the funding fight, figuring out how to store them, dragging them back and forth to the classroom, etc. But, what if I could use the idea without the hassle of the hardware? That's what this website does. It turns everyone's cellphone into a clicker device, with the results immediately posted on a website that we can all watch.

I bet there are other ways to think of phones--more so as students glom onto smartphones that will allow them to surf and perform other applications during class. Is it a distraction? Sure, it could be. But so can a pencil and a piece of paper (remember doodling during boring lectures?). Focusing on engaging students--and their tools--rather than limiting their use of technology presents an opportunity for online and in-class instruction.

Reflections from the Online Teaching and Learning Conference

Just back from the OTL conference at Cabrillo College. Great campus, and I'm glad the conference is soldiering on, though it was clearly affected by budget gloom. It seemed to me that it was about 1/2 or 1/3 its normal attendance.

Most of the attendees were gray-heads. Just noticed as I walked along with the group that we were all the older folks, close to retirement. I wonder about that. The majority of CC instructors are 50+, but this conference also attracts K-12 and university instructors, too, so seems like there would be more of a mix (and I think there has been in previous years). So, it might be that the budget has axed attendance by younger instructors. I wonder how many of those attending had, like I did, financed their attendance without help from their campus budgets. I bet a significant bunch. It may also be a sort of tipping point. Maybe this type of conference only attracts the digital immigrants--the digi-natives not seeing the point, immersed in the digital world as they've been all their lives. Hmmmm. There's a dissertation in there.

It's also occurring to me that younger instructors might not be as interested in or see the need for conferences--large or small. My guess is that this sort of f2f networking will go out the window in favor of social networking and video conferencing. This round of budget cuts may put the final nail in that coffin. Anyone working on ways to develop large-scale conferences out there? It's a ship ready to come to port.

New features of the conference that I liked was the greater emphasis on social networking. There was a twitter feature, a conference portal, FB page, etc. Smart thinking on the part of the organizers, as the push in online is clearly in this direction. All of this seemed to work better than the conference itself, an experience antithetical to my first OTL conference, which I attended virtually and found it to be plagued with tech issues. This time, the off-site attendees may have had the best experience. The webinars were the best of the bunch and there were sessions that I attended that were poorly thought out and executed--not the caliber that they have been in the past. So, I may try the virtual route again next year....

On Student Identity and Congressional Paranoia

In the latest Higher Ed Act, Congress requires colleges to have “processes” establishing that “the student who registers in a distance-education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit. As one might imagine, this has raised hackles for online instructors--yet another instance of requirements (roadblocks) foisted on online courses, yet not required of f2f courses. After the initial dustup over this, the latest word from the Chronicle is that the requirement will only require that campuses develop some type of secure login strategy.

Well--that ought to solve all the problems of student identity! Doesn't it seem as though a student bent on working the system by finding some shmuck who will take the course for him might also give the shmuck his login info?

Underlying this, of course, is distrust of students and of online learning. I bet someday instructors will look upon this paranoia and laugh. Sooner, the better....