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....

Irrelevancy--coming to a campus near you--and soon!

In a speech covered by the Deseret News, David Wiley predicts that colleges and universities will be irrelevant by 2020.  

This goes a step farther than a paper I wrote for my MS in which I argued the reasons why online learning would radically change education, in short: digital natives for students, tax repulsion, incessant upgrading of job skills, and the destruction of informational hierarchy.  Wiley uses the sames premises to arrive at the conclusion that universities are becoming dinosaurs.  Why would a student go to a class on a campus, ivy-covered or not, to sit still in a lecture room with 30 or 300 others and listen to one person speak for an hour or more?  As a person who LIKES a good lecture, even I am beginning to find myself itching for connectivity during such events.

Wiley notes that the one thing that campuses still have a monopoly on is their degrees.  I'm predicting that won't last for long.  Look for Google to cobble together a degree program based on online classes from around the world.  A BA from the U of Google, anyone?

Enlivening Online Courses

In recreating my online courses, I'm looking for more interactive, more graphically and media rich sources for exploration.  Two that are taking up too, too much time are YouTube EDU and LearningOutLoud.  As I'm looking into future studies for the next cycle of ENGL 1, it was really great to find the Great Valley Center video "Why the Central Valley Matters."   This is just one of some really great lectures--the kind you wish we'd get at COS, alas!  But collected here, it's an arguably even better resource.

Learning Out Loud is a collection of podcasts slanted toward more academic subjects, but infused with enough pop culture to be entertaining.  Again, easily searchable and a strong resource for finding rich media to add to curriculum.

So here I am in Santa Fe and...

...my biggest worry is how good the internet connection will be.  Forget the number of bugs in the bed (former phobia), the nature of the discoloration of the towels, the possibility of being mugged in the alley.  The stress that balls my stomach is all about connectivity.  After a 10 hour drive envying my fully-connected and online niece whose smartphone can effortlessly tell us intricate details about desert flora and fauna and more about local history than any E Clampus Vitus marker, all I want to do when I check in is get wired and find out what's going on in my internet world.  Salon ran this piece last week about the Freedom program that shuts off all internet access in some bizarre attempt to help people be more productive.  Oh, please!  Let me have my addiction.  It's nothing a two-day drive across the desert won't fix if needs be....