EdTech – Page 2 – Education, Technology & Business

Podcasting and Screencasting (ISTE12 workshop)

On Sunday morning I attended a session on Podcasting and Screencasting at ISTE12 led by Robert Craven (twitter at @digitalroberto, Web page). This was a seriously hands-on session in which we covered lots of software. The following are a listing of the software we used, my key take-aways, and then lots of detailed notes about the software that (possibly) only I will be interested in, but I included here just in case.

Software

This is the software that we touched on during the session:

Web sites

Mac software

GarageBand
iMovie
QuickTime

iPad apps

Showme (Showme)

A little context

Podcasting involves creating an RSS feed that delivers a series of media files that can be listened to or watched on a wide variety of devices (ipods, ipads, iphones, smart phones, computers). Podcasting has been around since September 2004. There are three varieties of podcasts:

Audio: Just an audio recording
Enhanced: Essentially a series of pictures with accompanying audio discussion
Video: A more complex audio/video lecture or discussion

The process of podcasting involves creating a podcasting stream (empty at the beginning), creating the media file, attaching the media file to the RSS podcasting stream, and then subscribers to your RSS podcasting stream actually receiving the media file automatically.

BTW, of the 30 people in the session, only about 3 used PCs; the rest used MacBooks and iPads. Apple has quite a market share in education.

Take-aways

Here are the main points (outside of the detailed software knowledge that I gained) related to this topic that I learned. Note that I focus on Mac software and iPad apps since that is what I use; his Web site has lots of details about PC software.

GarageBand is a great piece of software for creating audio and enhanced audio media files. It has all that you need, including the abilities to:
- Manage the process of recording the different voices in the podcast (including volume, trimming and otherwise editing),
- Insert music clips to be provided as background for the podcast,
- Provide a full library of freely available music clips,
- Provide integrated access to iPhoto, and
- Publish the podcast to your computer-based iTunes.
QuickTime (free with OS X now) provides an easy way to create a screencast. This is a great starting point before getting into more expensive software such as Screenflow and Camtasia for Mac. This also provides the abilities to capture the screencast and export it into iTunes.
BTW, MacBundle, MacUpdate, and MacHeist periodically have bundles of software (for maybe $40) that includes Screenflow so it might be worth it to wait around before buying it at full price.
Screencast provides a great way to create the podcasting RSS feed once you have created the media files. This is the tool that creates the RSS feed URL that anyone can put into iTunes when they want to subscribe to the podcast.
The Display Recorder app (currently $1.99) is a screenrecorder for the iPad. You can export the screencast to your Photo Library or open it another app on your iPad (iMovie, Dropbox, EverNote).
The ShowMe app enables the creation of a whiteboard type of screencast. It allows you to write on the screen, take a picture, record a voice. You can also do a little editing within the app. You can only post the resulting screencast to the showme.com site.

One of the attendees said that AirServer provides a good way of mirroring your iOS device onto a Mac or PC.

Also, be sure to check his link about digital storytelling from his Web site. This is less about the technology, and more about the process of telling stories.

Robert did a great job with this session, and I walked out with a much clearer picture of just what is involved in screencasting and the following creation of the podcasting RSS feed. None of the software is expensive, and all of it is easy to use given the underlying complexity of the process. I will be using all of this software in my classes next year.

Detailed notes

The following are my personal notes from the session. You will probably not find them useful but they provide a more detailed picture of what we did during the 3 hour session.

GarageBand

GarageBand to create a podcast (New Project/Podcast). Can have multiple layers of sound. Be sure to pay attention to the icons in the bottom right corner: the loop (garageband library), the “I” (for real instruments), and the iLife suite (for iPhoto, iMovie, etc.). This seems to not work with the combination of my Plantronics520 and my old MacBook Pro.
Use the playhead (triangle at the top) to cut a track (Split or Apple-T) at the point where the playhead is located.
You can use the “+” sign to add a track for another person’s voice.
When recording your voice, check the Recording Level so that there is no red, and so that the peak is about half way in the bar. This is available by clicking on the “I” icon in the bottom right, and “Recording Level” slider at the bottom right and the colored bars in the upper left.
It’s real easy to use your iPhone as a microphone. Then you can import those clips easily into GarageBand for podcast creation.
At the beginning and end of a track put an audio loop. If you have a series of podcasts, then use the same ones each time. Have some music by itself for 2-3 seconds before your voice begins (and into the beginning of your speaking) and then after your voice ends (and after you stop speaking, and through the credits, if there is such a thing).
To adjust a track volume, use the inverted triangle at the left of a track. You can adjust the whole track at once, or you can adjust for a special segment of the track by clicking on segments of the line.
To preview the podcast, and to see any images that you have imported, click on the image box to the right of Podcast Track in the upper left.
When you are done, make the menu choice Share/Send Podcast to iTunes — this is the iTunes on your computer, not the big iTunes in the Cloud. This will open iTunes and begin to play the track.

QuickTime for screencasting

Choose File/New Screen Recording to create a screencast file.
After finishing the recording, you can use Edit/Trim.
When done, choose Share/iTunes to put it in iTunes on your computer.
Jing is the equivalent application for a PC.

Screencast

Go to Screencast.com and sign in.
Each folder is a separate podcast channel so that they can be subscribed to separately.
Create a folder and be sure to make it public and check “RSS Feed”.
Click “Upload content”.
Once it is uploaded, then go to the folder in screencast, click on the “Share” icon. Copy the iTunes Feed URL.
In iTunes, choose the menu item Advanced/Subscribe to Podcast. It should begin to download almost immediately.
Click on the podcast, and then click on the “Settings” button at the bottom of the screen. Change the settings as appropriate.

DisplayRecorder (for iPad)

This app (currently $1.99) is a screenrecorder for the iPad. You can export it to your Photo Library or open it another app on your iPad (iMovie, Dropbox, EverNote).

ShowMe (for iPad)

This allows you to write on the screen, take a picture, record a voice. You can do a little editing within the app. You can only post this to the showme.com site.

VoiceThread

Provides a way for multiple people to comment on an image that has been uploaded to a Web site.

Teacher preparation with technology (ISTE12 workshop)

Introduction

The purpose of this session (here is their Web site) at ISTE12 was to introduce university faculty and teacher educators to TPACK as an organizing framework to focus modeling of technology use and preparing teachers to integrate technology in their teaching. This is an organizing framework rather than some software or whatever. Another purpose is to share models for assisting teacher educators in applying TPACK to curriculum as a tool to aid in technology integration.

There are three leaders of this session:

Mark Hofer from William & Mary (mark.hofer@wm.edu)
Teresa Foulger, Arizona State University (teresa.foulger@asu.edu)
Sarah McPherson from New York Institute of Technology (smcphers@nyit.edu)

TPACK is “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge.” It is the intersection of Technological knowledge, Pedagogical knowledge, and Content knowledge (subject matter). In other words:

Any use of technology needs to fit with the pedagogical style of the teacher and the content to be taught.

This is all some sort part of Microsoft’s Teacher Education Initiative whose purpose is “to teach [education educators] how to more systemically integrate technology when teaching pre-service teachers.”

Points to remember

These are three things that I took from the introductory discussion:

Don’t forget that some of what students need to learn is inter-disciplinary skills, and technology can be a tool to help draw the separate areas of knowledge.
We need to move from use of technology, integrate technology with our teaching, and now to innovate with technology. And capturing a lecture on video and playing it on some geeky player doesn’t change the fact that a lecture is a lecture. There are times that we need to move beyond the lecture, no matter how cool it might look.
The boundaries between art, science, creativity, design, and business are disappearing. We need to think about how we can bring them together instead of break them apart.

Exercises

The following are a series of exercises that we worked on for the last 90 minutes or so of class. It is a menu of possibilities for getting teachers to think about technology and teaching.

We were challenged to fit together a random pedagogy (chosen from a deck of cards containing one pedagogy each) with a random content area with a random technology (same as previous). This was a creative exercise to stretch our mind, to get us to think about unusual and unexpected combinations so that we think more broadly.
Mini-teach:
- You get a technology tool, and then you are asked to come up with a scenario when that tool might be used. They have to learn the tool on their own, and then come and deliver a short lesson using that tool (on content of their own using a technology of their own).
- The way she (Teresa) uses this approach is have a list of technology tools (see her side bar), give each student a random technology, and assigns them to learn it in an hour on their own. Just play with the tool. She asks them to design a learning experience using that tool on some content (that they choose themselves).
- She has also done it as a poster session with faculty (before a faculty meeting).
- Check the Innovations menu on the side of her page for all the technologies they are looking at.
- She asks them to think about what’s the added value of the technology (e.g., a wiki); what did the technology add that could not have happened without the technology?
Learning activity types: With a different set of learning activities and taxonomies for a particular discipline, pair the beginning teacher with specific appropriate technologies and see how each would develop lessons based on that.
Universal design for learning: Start with the student, and look at a framework that addresses what we teach, and then how we teach it, and then why we teach it (or learn about it). We have to think about these all together, as an integrated whole. This process involves looking at the motivation and student’s interaction with the whole learning process; you can’t ignore their motivations when thinking about how and what to teach. You have to focus on who the students are, and what stage they’re at.

As an aside, I learned about PollEverywhere as a tool for getting input from students.

Smart phones for college students

Take-over by the tech companies

Look at all of these hard-working students. Not a Facebook page in sight!

The editorial “Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?” by Michael Hiltzik (Feb 2012, Los Angeles Times) was a pull-no-punches examination of the push for educational technology by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. This quote should give you a flavor of his beliefs:

There’s certainly an important role for technology in the classroom. And the U.S. won’t benefit if students in poor neighborhoods fall further behind their middle-class or affluent peers in access to broadband Internet connectivity or computers. But mindless servility to technology for its own sake, which is what Duncan and Genachowski are promoting on behalf of self-interested companies like Apple, will make things worse, not better.

That’s because it distracts from and sucks money away from the most important goal, which is maintaining good teaching practices and employing good teachers in the classroom. What’s scary about the recent presentation by Duncan and Genachowski is that it shows that for all their supposed experience and expertise, they’ve bought snake oil. They’re simply trying to rebottle it for us as the elixir of the gods.

And here’s another one:

Many would-be educational innovators treat technology as an end-all and be-all, making no effort to figure out how to integrate it into the classroom. “Computers, in and of themselves, do very little to aid learning,” Gavriel Salomon of the University of Haifa and David Perkins of Harvard observed in 1996. Placing them in the classroom “does not automatically inspire teachers to rethink their teaching or students to adopt new modes of learning.”

So he clearly thinks that this whole move towards educational technologies is primarily driven by the underlying goal of profits for the technology companies themselves, as opposed to the improvement of education.

The Seton Hall smartphone story

I recently read his article (which I highly suggest you do) and then came across another piece of news in the article “Smartphones at school: Seton Hall to give freshman class free phones in new program” by Kelly Hayboer (June 2012, The Star-Ledger). She reports that, in addition to the laptop that Seton Hall is continuing to give to its incoming freshmen, the university is now going to give away Nokia Lumia 900 (a Windows smartphone). David Pogue recently wrote a positive review of the Nokia Lumia 900 (April 2012, NYTimes), so the problem certainly isn’t with the phone itself.

The usual suspects

Things smell a little fishy once you begin to look at the companies involved. For example, after reading “Nokia plans 10,000 layoffs, cuts second-quarter outlook” by Don Reisinger (June 2012, C|Net), it becomes clear (if it wasn’t already) that Nokia is in serious financial trouble. Also, “Nokia is now the world’s second-largest cell phone company, ending a 14-year run at the top.” Nokia is clearly desperate for marketshare at essentially any cost.

As for Microsoft, their Windows mobile operating system (now called Windows Phone), is perennially underachieving and failing to capture marketshare. This hasn’t kept analysts from showing them the love year after year. For example (as reported in this article, but it’s everywhere on the Web), just recently IDC predicted that, although they currently have only 5.2% of the market and Apple has 20.5%, Windows Phone will surpass iOS’s market share by 2016. This doesn’t change the fact that they are still at 5.2% after over a decade of effort.

So what are the specifics of the Seton Hall give-away? According to the article:

The phones…come with a free AT&T calling plan with 300 voice minutes a month and unlimited data and domestic text messaging through December.

After December, students will be offered discounted AT&T calling plans if they want to continue using the phones to make calls and text, campus officials said. If not, they will still keep the phones and use them in class for projects, video conferencing and to connect to the campus wifi network. They must return the phones if they drop out of college.”

This doesn’t surprise me at all. The phone only retails for $99 right now, so giving the phone away (even if Seton Hall isn’t footing the bill) for the prospect of getting a certain percentage of the 1400 students to pick up the approximately $30/month data plan beginning in January seems like a reasonable plan from a business perspective.

Seton Hall’s motivation

But what about the college’s perspective? This was the most intriguing quote that I came across:

Seton Hall officials said they realize most students already have cell phones for personal use. But giving everyone equal access to the same smartphone means every student, no matter their income, can learn on the same device.

What a strange perspective! “[E]very student…can learn on the same device.” And this is good or interesting or useful…how? It would be one thing if the device in question was ubiquitous, but we’re talking about a Nokia/Windows phone device, so that’s certainly not the case.

It is a new standards-based, open, & interoperable world that we live in — the Web, Facebook app API, twitter messages, email, PDF, HTML5, PNG, MPEG4. We expect to be able to send messages and files between any devices, and to work with them on the same way on different devices. If some application isn’t available on multiple devices, then in some way it isn’t that important yet. This isn’t the old world of Microsoft Windows hegemony. As important as Apple’s iOS is, it only has 20% of the market while Android (in all its various shapes and colors and flavors) has over 60%. No one should be specializing any curriculum for any mobile device.

Maybe, somehow, SHU officials (and the supportive and encouraging Microsoft and Nokia executives behind all this) believe that faculty, knowing that every student will now (finally!) have smart phones available to them, will make sweeping changes to their classes that take advantage of the specific advantages that this phone provides.

There are so many things wrong with this line of thinking. I will try to keep my thoughts limited to a few:

Faculty only rarely update their classes, and certainly not for some particular technology. If they do, it will take years and, by then, the technology will have changed.
Faculty have spent the last 5-10 years fighting the onslaught of cell phones into their classes. Why would they somehow get excited to know that they all have school-supplied cell phones in their backpacks? (Or, more likely, hidden under their desks.)
Are they having a “If you build it, [they] will come” moment? Do they think that it’s a good idea to invest in a technology and then figure out what to do with it? Are you kidding me? This is what happens when people who have no understanding of faculty or technology are running the show — or when administrators let technology companies take over leadership, as Hiltzik believes.

Recommendations

Universities should support a BYOD (or BYOT) policy. As Forrester recently stated, BYOD is coming with or without IT: “IT managers concerned over the challenges BYOD presents may actually face greater concerns by ignoring BYOD than by implementing solutions to support the trend.” Some school districts are already supporting such a policy. This is in the context of a recent survey of college students that found that “40% cannot go more than 10 minutes without using some sort of digital technology and 67% cannot go more than an hour.”

Faculty should, for their own employability, begin to figure out how to live in such a world. If students have cell phones (smart or not, even though that distinction is beginning to lose its meaning), then professors should learn to figure out how to use them if they help students achieve the learning outcomes for the class. I am sure that these learning outcomes won’t rely in any way on the availability of a specific phone.

Also, think about the device in the context of the student’t life! Would they want another device to carry around just for school? I think not. Let them use their own smart phone. The classroom application of the cell phone that a faculty member would be interested in coming up with would be generally available across multiple cell phone platforms (via HTML5, MPEG4, or similar technologies). A student should be able to access the content on whatever device they have with them, whether it be a Windows Phone, an iPad, or a Samsung laptop. If some student doesn’t have a cell phone, then get an agreement with some providers (not all, but some) to provide the phones at a discount. If some phone would be helpful in a class, then the student could consider buying the discounted phone or some other phone if he/she thinks it would serve his/her purposes better.

Think about your students. Think about the faculty. Be able to describe what you want from the technology, no matter who is providing it. And then go to the technology companies with a proposal. If they can’t help you, then wait — at some point some company will be in some situation in which they’re in a weaker bargaining position and will come to some agreement that is acceptable to both parties. But, the key idea is have a plan before you go looking for a partner. Or you might end up in a situation that benefits them but not you.

Using the Doceri whiteboard app for the iPad

I recently received the Doceri Goodpoint Stylus along with my previously downloaded Doceri Remote app for the iPad and the Doceri Desktop application for my laptop. I am extremely impressed by this combination of hardware and software, so I put together a video that explains just what it is and what it’s like to use it. They have lots of good videos on their site, but I always feel better if I see some type of non-affiliated endorsement of a product than if it is strictly a corporate, official demonstration. Well, I hope this 13+ minute video fills that role for you. You’ll probably want to watch it on YouTube instead of embedded on this site.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ECOJhSNgaA]

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about this product. I will follow up as soon as I can. Thanks!

Effects of technology adoption on quality and cost

Introduction

This final post in my series related to educational technology ends on a positive note. The first post I listed some recent facts about changes in the global education system, especially related to China, and the importance of the implications for U.S. universities. In the second post for the first time I propose that the way to provide a great education at a lower cost is highly related to the concept of community:

Students have to feel they are part of a supportive and available educational community — as both givers and receivers of that support — as they strive toward personally relevant goals.

I also briefly described my belief in the importance of both project-based learning and involving students as both learners and teachers. The third post I analyzed in some detail the effects of using educational technologies on the time and effort spent by professors on tasks related to teaching.

In this post I make the case that using educational technology at a university should enable teaching quality to increase while associated costs decrease, possibly dramatically. Even though I am quite a big user of technology, I do not believe that simply adding technology automatically makes the education process better, or the students happier, or the professors more productive. Tom Vander Ark, in “How digital learning is boosting achievement”, lists lots of examples and studies that provide support for the following points:

Blended schools achieve high performance
Hundreds of studies of online and blended learning show efficiency
Technology-enabled math products have boosted achievement
Digital learning offers the only path to boosting achievement in this “decade of deficits”

Just as with every other industry that technology has had an effect on, it is the disruptive innovation, whatever it may be, that we have to be on the lookout for. I believe that organizations like P2PU and Coursera are only the first, tentative stabs at disruption. The big changes are yet to come.

In any case, in the meantime we need to gain experience with technology because it will be central to the educational industry whether we like it or not. The question becomes how to achieve the increases in quality and decreases in costs as we move forward. I believe it is not a question as to whether there is a place for technology in the education process — it is how to use it in ways that radically improve learning. I believe at either the personal level or the organizational level that if we wait until it is clear what needs to be done, then it will be too late. So, ready, fire, aim is the order of the day.

The following describes how I envision being able to achieve take the first steps toward achieving this end in my classes.

Increase quality

I am a firm believer in the importance of individual attention given to a student, engagement of a student in the learning process, personal relevance of educational activities, and disciplined (or rigorous) and clear communication by a student. I believe that increasing any one of these (and hopefully all of them) would mean an increase in the quality of education.

Individual attention

Several dimensions of the move to increased use of technology should increase the individual attention that a student receives. For many professors teaching many of his/her classes, the professor should use video to deliver lectures that explain important course concepts. An easy way to make this move is to go ahead and record the lectures the professor currently gives, and then edit them and post them in appropriate pieces. This will minimize the amount of work necessary to begin this process. The next step would be to make movies outside of a classroom setting to optimize, or at least improve, the delivery of some of that material.

No matter how it is done, delivery of basic material outside of class time makes the time during class available for either explaining more complex material or working with students individually on their problems. This would seem to be a no-brainer.

As an example, consider the class I taught 2 years ago. It was about finding Web-based information resources. At the beginning of each class I would spend about 15-20 minutes lecturing and demonstrating tools. We would then spend the next hour or so working through exercises. Students were encouraged to work together to solve their problems and to call me when they had a problem they could not solve. This generally worked fairly well; however, I believe I can make it work better in a blended format, and possibly in a purely online environment.

I believe the next step for this class is pretty obvious. Make a library of the videos explaining concepts and demonstrating systems, and then load them onto YouTube. This frees up time in class, but also drops the requirement that students attend class in order to hear my lecture. Students can ask questions over twitter (using a standard hashtag or twitter account), with other students and teaching assistants having the ability to answer questions or chime in with hints. Also, I now can make additional time per week to meet with students about their projects or help them with any other problems they might be having.

Student engagement

If there is one single thing that I target my efforts for, it is student engagement. Most of my efforts, thinking, theorizing, and planning are directed at ways in which I can increase it. I think the changes here are subtle, but will feel more real to those involved with the class. (Going out on a limb here, actually, simply based on some limited experience.)

One feature of the real world is that communication between two people (i.e., a conversation) is, or at least can be, private. On the other hand, it is difficult to allow hundreds (or millions) of people to eavesdrop on that conversation. This feature makes it hard for future students to take advantage of exchanges made by previous students (either one hour or one week in the past). Suppose we move all (short) student and teacher interactions to twitter. (We could also use twitter to announce longer answers that are at some particular Web address.) This would allow other students to hear, and respond to and learn from, conversations by the teacher and some other student. Do this enough and, before you know it, the student will have learned something, gotten drawn into a conversation, or will have answered another student’s question.

I think the devil is in the details here. It will take constant nudging, hints, and probably a few class points to get students moving in the right direction. However, I think the payoff is possibly huge. First, students can have more opportunities to be involved as a teacher because of the openness of the communication lines. Second, as discussed in some detail above, students can become more involved as a learner on specific problems that other students bring up. They might also find the somewhat impersonal nature of the communication to ease their fears about participating (i.e., asking and answering questions). Thus, though there is no particular big breakthrough here, I believe more opportunities for raising student engagement are always a good thing.

Relevance of activities

Though I think engagement is the most important facet, sometimes I’m not sure whether relevance isn’t more important. If not, then it’s at least a real big determinant of resulting engagement. Since I’m at least somewhat rational, this has led me to focus quite a bit on increasing the relevance of student activities.

I’m moving to a much more project-based experience for a class. Much of the benefit of moving to a project comes from allowing the student to choose the topic for the project. I strongly believe that choosing a topic leads to commitment to the project which leads to more persistent effort which leads to more learning. Pretty much every time. How could I not be interested in choosing a classroom strategy that gets more students to work harder on my class by their own personal motivation?

An ancillary benefit, but one which really helps with classroom management, is that every student having their own project topic removes many, if not most, restraints on students helping other students. It makes it much easier for me to tell the students that they can answer any question from another student — the only thing that I ask is that each student end up doing his/her own work. But if one student can help another student learn something, to teach them something that I wasn’t able to teach them, then who I am to step in the way?

Disciplined and clear communication by a student

I really hope that students think a lot about my classes.

I am a big believer in the importance of speaking and writing. I also believe that the only way to improve as a speaker or writer is to speak or write more. I also believe that different channels (face-to-face, email, twitter) require different types of communication, and have different standards and practices. The only way to get better at a specific type of communication is to engage in that type of communication. Further, the only way ultimately to be a good communicator is to have clear thinking underlying it. I just don’t believe that good communicating can happen without clear thinking. It certainly is possible to have bad communication happen even with clear thinking — that is why we have to practice and improve our communication — but having clear thoughts about a topic makes bad communication much less likely.

Having said all that, I like frequent communication from students. Moving this communication online changes the channel, so students are practicing a different type of communication. It will be much more difficult for students to get better at face-to-face communication when online, but they will be able to get better at email, twitter, blog posts, and wiki construction. I believe that these forms of communication are important now and will continue to become more important for students.

Students can only get better if they receive helpful feedback. Again, having communications occur in public, out in the open for others to see, should make it easier for others (teaching assistants and students) to give feedback. It also provides more “examinable & gradable objects” during the duration of a class. I plan on assigning blogs to write, twitter feeds to submit, comparative or analytical essays to write, and explanatory chapters to contribute. Each of these have different standards, and inviting students into the grading process should increase their understanding of what level of achievement is acceptable and of how to improve the work that has been produced.

Decrease costs

I addressed much of this in previous post, but the basic points to focus on are that educational technologies (1) allow a professor to substitute fixed investments for time investments that vary with the number of students and/or sections, (2) expand the influence of a professor, and (3) allow the substitution of cheaper labor for more expensive. I expand on these points below.

Substitute fixed costs for variable costs

The task of delivering a lecture now is a fixed expenditure of time and effort, independent of the number of students who are taking the class. If one professor of a six section core course is particularly expert at delivering a lecture on a specific topic, then that one lecture (given at one point in time) can be re-used for all six sections of the course, freeing up not only the professor from giving it multiple times to his/her sections but freeing also freeing up the other professor from having to give it at all while also providing the students with a better learning experience.

Expand influence of professor

The professor should now have an expanded influence; that is, he should be able to reach more students both through video lectures and other electronic communication channels. This follows pretty clearly from all the discussion above. It is also the case that easier problems can now be handled much more frequently and easily by students or teaching assistants. Why? Because the existence of the problems will be known and obvious since they are taking place in an open communication channel (e.g., twitter). If the professor has to spend less time on simple problems (a known and extensive time sink), then the professor should be able to handle more students. How many more? The only way to answer this is to experiment with larger classes and see how it works.

Substitute cheaper labor for more expensive

Finally, as classes get larger, professors and students would probably benefit from the creation of a new division of labor — a professional teaching assistant (not a student aide, but a real professional) for a particular class (e.g., a multi-section core class would be a good place to start). I actually had one of these for the project class that I taught a couple of school years ago. She handled lots of the simpler paperwork and organizational activities, freeing me up to focus on the students and their projects. Having experienced this first-hand, I can quite reliably say that she provided lots of benefits; and having had her work on the class for multiple semesters, it became clear to both of us that she was able to handle lots of tasks that freed me up in many more ways in the second year (compared with the first).

I can really see this applying in many more situations with larger classes enabled by technology. Compared to the cost of adding another professor to handle more students, the cost of hiring her to handle tasks that she could handle, and then freeing me up to work with the additional students, ended up costing the school a lot less.

Conclusion

So, that’s it — that’s my case (with some handwaving, to be sure) that using educational technology should enable teaching quality to increase while associated costs decrease. One of my underlying assumptions is that enrollments can be increased or faculty appointments can be decreased. If neither of these can happen, then the cost benefit will not be realized. However, the quality benefit should be unaffected so it seems like it would be a reasonable strategy to pursue, even in the short run.

Let me know your thoughts about my argument. Are you persuaded? What did I miss? Anything else that I should add to strengthen the argument? Let me know!

Effects of educational technology on teaching tasks

In yesterday’s article I proposed that the way to provide a great education at a lower cost is based on the concept of community:

Students have to feel they are part of a supportive and available educational community — as both givers and receivers of that support — as they strive toward personally relevant goals.

I then proposed that both project-based learning and students taking the roles of both learners and teachers are two important components of my proposal.

Today I analyze the specific tasks related to the teaching process, and then look at the effects of some educational technologies on those tasks. In the (I think) final post in this series, I will address questions that have to do with the quality of the resulting education and the relative cost of that education.

Tasks related to the teaching process

Suppose your school has six sections of each core class, with each section having 80 students in it. In a traditional structure, a professor might be responsible for teaching three of those sections, so two professors would be needed for all six sections. Each professor coordinates with the other, but for his/her own sections the professor would be responsible for preparing the lectures, delivering the lectures, supervising and coordinating learning activities, communicating with the students out-of-class (either through email or office hours), monitoring any student projects and directing the teams, designing assignments and tests, and coordinating (or doing) the grading. It is assumed that, above a certain size, a professor would need assistance (in the form of a T.A. or administrative support) in order to effectively handle all of the tasks that are needed to be completed.

It takes a very committed faculty member to form a personal connection with 200+ students in a semester. Many times, because of prior commitments or whatnot, this is simply asking too much of the professor. In any case, let’s look at these different tasks in a bit more detail related to whether or not they are expenses that vary with the number of students or are fixed:

Preparing the lectures: Fixed. It really does not matter how many students are going to be sitting in a class — a lecture is a lecture.
Delivering the lectures: Varies with number of sections. Again, it does not matter how many students are going to be sitting in a classroom; however, if there are six different sections of the class, then it will take six times as long to deliver the lecture (if you are doing it live and in-person).
Supervising activities: Varies with number of students or number of sections. Many times a professor assigns exercises or activities for the students to complete as part of the learning or teaching process. One single professor can only supervise or provide feedback to a limited number of students.
Student communication: Varies a decreasing amount with number of students. Generally, each additional student requires a certain amount more time to handle individual requests and/or emails. As the number of students increase, the repetition among these messages begins to give some amount of scale effects because answers can be re-used. Office hours adds something of a step-wise nature to this relationship. With an increasing number of students, hours on additional days have to be set aside for those students who inevitably could not come to other hours because of their own conflicts or too many other students in line.
Monitoring projects: Varies directly with number of students. In many classes, this is where a professor’s expertise and experience will come most into play. As such, it is where his/her time can be in most demand. The result is that project work is only hesitantly given. Assigning the projects in groups can mitigate the investment, but it still can end up being quite significant.
Designing assignments: Fixed. It does not matter how many students are going to be completing an assignment. The professor must take time to design the assignment, but that time does not vary with the number of students.
Grading assignments: Varies directly with the number of students (similar comments to “monitoring projects”).

Effects of adding technologies to the mix

The educational process is moving out to the Internet

Now, let’s look at the effects on the above tasks if we add educational technologies to the mix. I’m assuming that the technologies are things like a modern CMS, Google Hangout, YouTube videos, and twitter. In addition (building on my suggestion from the previous post), I am going to assume that students take the role of teacher at times in addition to their traditional and on-going role as learner.

Preparing the lectures: Fixed. Using videos for some (or all) of the lectures will almost assuredly increase the fixed amount of time it takes to prepare for a lecture (compared with the traditional delivery model) because there are more and unfamiliar decisions to make in the design of the lecture.
Delivering the lectures: Fixed. Now, instead of being a variable expense of time, it is fixed — probably longer than one class period, but still fixed. Further, it can then be re-used multiple times, over multiple programs and multiple years if needed.
Supervising activities: Varies with number of students or number of sections, but at a lower rate per student. This is where the computerization of the activities and the availability of student-teachers (that is, students taking the role of teachers) come into play. Students who understand the activity (and who may have been blessed as being one who has reached an appropriate knowledge level) can be used to help tutor other students in the class. Teachers know better than anyone that actually teaching some material is the best way to learn about that material — why not pass along that benefit to students? Through the integration of students into the teaching role, I believe that a professor can supervise a greatly increased number of students during these activities.
Student communication: Varies a decreasing amount with number of students and, again, at a lower rate per student. With tools such as Google Hangouts (applied to office hours) and twitter (enabling asking and answering of questions by the twittersphere), I believe, again, that a professor can handle a greatly increased number of students, especially if the professor is able to create a feeling of community among the students.
Monitoring projects: Varies directly with number of students. It is definitely still the case that this is where a professor’s expertise and experience will usually come most into play. As such, it is where his/her time can be in most demand. However, I believe it is a mistake to forget the value of students who have successfully completed the class. In traditional project-based classes I have taught, I have used students who did well in my class to mentor students currently in the class. The mentors have to take a 1-credit hour class on mentoring techniques, so they get some official recognition for helping out. These mentors almost universally contribute to the success of my students. The use of these mentors definitely allowed me to more easily supervise more groups. I don’t see why moving the projects or students online would change this.
Designing assignments: Fixed. The same as before.
Grading assignments: Varies directly with the number of students (similar comments to “monitoring projects”). Same as above.

Benefits of adding technology

So, looking at the changes from the first scenario to the second:

For fixed-time activities, the time for preparing lectures will probably increase.
Delivering lectures changes from being a variable task to a fixed task. The benefits of this should increase as the number of students (and associated number of sections) increases.
Both supervising activities and student communications should take less time per student with computational support (and additional student involvement).
If students can be recruited to provide additional support, then both monitoring projects and grading assignments should take less per additional student when computational support is provided. Another way of saying this is that a professor should be able to indirectly monitor more projects and grade more assignments with a more computational process.

Wrap up

It appears that professors should be able to teach more students using technology than without. The questions still remain as to how quality will be affected and whether costs will go up or down. Again, I say that I plan to get to these questions in the next post. (We’ll see, huh?)

For now, what do you think about this analysis? Again, am I being too optimistic about the technologies? Am I missing some task in my analysis? Am I getting the effects of the technologies correct? Let me know what you think!

Trials of a new video producer

Yes, I am interested in technology, and I have quite a (long) history with it. Yes, I am interested in the use of technology in education, and I also have quite a (okay, again, long) history with it. And, yes, I am going to teach (the enrollment gods be willing) a class on living and learning digitally to business students that will be mostly online and use lots of video.

But I have not ever actually published a video using iMovie. Oops. That might be what’s referred to as a “hole in the resume.”

It is true that I have previously created a video promoting an earlier version of this class and created another series of videos explaining how to edit wikidot pages (with over 13k views! I had no idea). However, both of these were created (in ways that I only vaguely recall) with software that was cheap, difficult to use, and not that robust. I’m not even sure that I could get it to work again.

Given my plans to teach this class in this manner, I recently decided to actually test whether or not I could put together a video. I know there are other professors out there who are intrigued by where technology is going but are uncertain about the move from classroom to video, so I figured I would document these early, tentative steps. I know how to speak in front of a classroom, no problem. Delivering content over video is more complicated. There’s the content itself (essentially the same, though structured differently), then the delivery of the content into a camera (very, very different), and the assembling and publishing of that digital content. I wanted to see for myself, before I got too far into this process, just how hard or easy it is to complete that last step. If that step is too hard to take, then I would have to change my whole concept of what it means to deliver this type of class.

The following two videos are the result of that first test. The first simply tests my abilities to use iMovie to create a movie, and the second shows the current state of my production facility and the hardware I use.

Initial tests of hardware and software

This is really raw video. (Please don’t judge! I’m not performing or using my stage voice or anything. This is “testing, testing, 1, 2, 3.”) This video is the result of using my MacBook Pro, an iSight camera (since my laptop’s camera stopped working a couple of years ago), iMovie, a microphone, and a document camera. (More on all of this below.) Here is the movie; my comments follow.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4-E2JB7ySo width=”420″ height=”315″]

I published this in “Large” format (808×540), suitable for Apple TV, computer, and YouTube. I will have to think about this as I go along. For an iPhone, it recommends publishing at 480×320; however, some loss of detail would certainly occur.
It is simply a matter of checking a box to have iMovie automatically insert a standard transition between scenes. I used “cross-fade.”
Inserting a title (at the beginning), subtitles (before scenes), and credits (if needed at the end) couldn’t be easier. Drag and drop, then type. Done.
At 0:05 when I first appear on screen: so many things to see here.
- I have a ceiling light to the left of my head; I am going to have to change the alignment of the camera to get that to go away.
- The lighting on my face is a bit dark, and shadows are being cast across my face. (Later, I will address this.) It is hard to get this right because I have a light directly above my desk (a different ceiling light) and none in front of me. Who has a light shining on his face (but only direct light!)? Well, certainly, not me. What I had to do (for this shot; I do more later) was put a desk lamp next to the camera and behind the laptop and point it away from me so that it reflected off the wall.
- So far I like working with this microphone. It is comfortable, the ear microphone is sufficient, and the sound pick-up seems acceptable. I wanted to get a microphone because I plan on lecturing to a camera in front of a whiteboard and I figured I would need one at that time since I would be turning my head periodically away from the camera. (I will test this setup soon.)
At 0:21 the first subtitle screen appears. (I’m sure this has another name.) Again, this was super simple.
0:26: I recorded a second short clip in order to test how to handle the insertion of a second video into the movie and how transitions work. I need to remember to have at least 1 second of me staring at the camera at the beginning and ending of a clip in order to provide time for the transition to work effectively. The transitions take about 0.5 seconds off the end of a clip and blend it into the beginning of the next clip so you don’t want to be doing or saying anything at that time.
0:37: I wanted to record a clip and then insert a voice-over to see how it works. I recorded the whole clip, and then I went back and used iMovie to record the audio for the middle segment. The audio for the voice-over came out different than it did for the rest of the segment. I have no idea why because I used the same hardware and software for everything. I still have to investigate this.
At 0:53 the doc-cam makes its appearance. This was kinda tricky to setup — actually, not really to setup but more specifically to understand how to setup — but it is easy to use.
- I will have to use a more bold-faced pen if I am going to write on paper.
- Though the doc-cam has an audio pick-up, I set up the software to use the head mic that I had on.
- The doc-cam appears to be much more comfortable working in a Windows environment than a Mac environment. The software that is made available for the Mac is explicitly in beta (and it should be). It works, but it has some glitches. The major one is that it records the video in one orientation, with the top of the video being away from the base and the bottom of the video being closest to the base. The software has a button that is supposed to rotate the video, but it doesn’t really work. This ends up not being a problem (at least as far as I can tell for now) because, after the movie is saved, QuickTime can rotate the movie into the correct orientation.
- I was hoping to use this camera during live feeds, but it doesn’t appear to be a standard video feed. I can’t get my Mac to choose it as a standard video input so I can’t switch to it — it only works when it is being controlled by its own software. I will have to continue investigating this, and possibly look for another product if I can’t figure it out.
- Regardless of all the above, I think the image is pretty clear and doesn’t have a lot of the ghosting and blurring that older, school-supplied doc-cams seem to always have. I definitely would feel comfortable using this hardware in a pre-recorded segment.
1:14: I wanted to test if the selection of audio input made a difference in the recording. I definitely like the change in audio quality from the first segment (computer microphone) to this one (Bluetooth mic).

All in all, it was a successful test. I still have some issues to investigate, but it all seemed doable. Now I just have to work on my on-camera personality.

Production facility

This video shows my “production facility” (aka my basement). The video itself is somewhat of a technical test as well, since it is a combination of video off my iSight and off my first-generation Flip. (I recently was saddened to discover that my Flip HD has died after barely being used. Got a new battery and it didn’t revive it. That’s really too bad since I haven’t seen anything that approaches its combination of cost, simplicity, and quality output. I am going to have to keep my eyes open.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz0ncwpsClQ width=”420″ height=”315″]

Here’s a list of what I discuss in the video:

Apple MacBook Pro: This is a 15″ early 2008 model with 4GB of RAM running Lion 10.7.4. The main problem is that it is nearly out of hard disk space (as well as the aforementioned camera issue). I will be replacing this soon. For now it serves it purpose quite well.
iMovie: I was fairly amazed by how easy it was to get started with this. I watched their introductory video, but that’s the extent of the training that I underwent before I did any of this. I’m sure that Final Cut Pro X is a wonderful piece of software, and I’m also guessing that I will start pining for it at some time; however, for now I can see being satisfied with iMovie and its focus on ease-of-use.
Plantronics Voyager 520: This is a noise-canceling, Bluetooth, over-the-ear microphone. It is comfortable and seems to provide adequate sound quality. I will have to monitor this over time but this looks like it was a good investment.
Luna Interactive Projection Camera: As I said before, the Mac software that comes with this is a bit iffy, but the hardware seems solid. I especially like the quality of the video that it produces. The only thing that bothers me is the difficulty using it in a streaming video.
Flip Video (original): This is a solid, reliable piece of hardware. As long as it doesn’t fail (seem Flip HD experience above), I expect that I will use this for a while. I next need to test it out in a room with me in front of a whiteboard. This will have to wait for future explorations (and associated posts).

Conclusion

I’m a long-time Mac user beginning with the Mac SE/30 in 1989 all the way through my current iPad, MacBook Pro, and MacPro 12-core tower with 16GB of RAM (I run lots of computation-intensive simulations in my research) so I am comfortable working in that environment. However, “working in that environment” and “producing videos” are two completely different things.

I now have the confidence to invest a bit more time in learning specific techniques and approaches to teaching on video. I didn’t feel the urge to investigate these before because I didn’t have the confidence that I would be able to carry it off. Now I do.

I hope these videos and this blog post gives you confidence that you could get into the video production business, at least on a part-time basis. Do you have any help for me on the next steps on my learning journey? Let me know if you do.

Introducing “Living & Learning Digitally”

In the fall 2012 semester at Michigan’s Ross School of Business I will be teaching “BIT330 Web-based information resources” (its official name) or, more accurately, “Living & learning digitally.” A current, evolving draft of the course Web site is now available, but understand that it may change significantly in some aspects in the next couple months.

Overview

This 3-credit course will be taught MW4-5:30pm. What is usually thought of as the course content will be delivered mostly online via pre-recorded video. Students will only infrequently need to actually attend class at the “official” time. I will have frequent online office hours via Google Hangouts. There will be lots of twitter usage, and participation will be related to the timely completion of online activities. This course has no prerequisites and is available for sophomores, juniors, & seniors.

For a previous incarnation of this course, I made this video. I will update this soon, but you should get the general idea of the class from it.

Purpose of the course

The course goal is to prepare the student for living and learning digitally. This preparation will be accomplished through academic study as well as through usage of current technologies, both well-known and under-appreciated. The following are the four basic threads running through the course:

Communicating digitally (via text)

One-on-one: Perhaps not shockingly, at times we will use email to communicate among ourselves. I will also use twitter to reach you, and I expect you will do the same (if you don’t already).
One-to-many broadcast: I will use the course twitter account to send out announcements to the class. I expect that everyone will follow this account during the semester and will (probably) have the messages forwarded to their phones.
Publishing: We will experience three different modes of publishing in this course:
- Blog: As part of your weekly learning tasks, you will write short blog entries to the public course blog site. The audience for this blog is an informed college student who is not taking this course.
- Wiki: Each student in the class will create an analyst’s report on some business & industry. The information will be gathered through the application of all the tools (see below) that we will learn about during the semester. Students will get to choose their own topic (with some guidance provided by the instructor). The creation of this report is something that student’s in previous years have enjoyed immensely.
- Digital book: An addition to the course this year will be the production of a digital book by all the students in the class. While this has been done in other UM classes (most effectively and famously by Brian Coppola in the introductory chemistry class), I do not believe that it has been done at Ross (or in other business schools, though I may be mistaken about that). Each student will contribute a chapter (with guidance from the professor and others in the class) to a book that the public at large can use as a reference to the most powerful tools and interesting applications that we learn about in the class. We will publish the book at the end of the semester, with each contributing student getting appropriate credit. The goal will be that future classes will add to & revise this book as appropriate.

Communicating digitally (via video)

Part of the purpose of this class is to get students comfortable with communicating via video in a relatively structured setting. I believe that current UM students will be asked to go through lots of similar learning activities in the future either in their jobs or in more advanced studies. I also believe that getting a head-start on learning how to succeed in such an experience will be valuable for these students.

One-on-one: We will use Google Hangouts for one-on-one tutoring and Q&A when it is needed.
One-to-many: I will create short videos that introduce the topics and tools that we will discuss in the class; these will be lectures in front of a board, lectures with PowerPoint slides, basic talking head, or me demonstrating a Web-based (or iPad-based) tool. These videos will be available on YouTube.
Within small groups: For office hours I plan on being available on Google Hangout a couple of times during the week. Right now, up to 10 people can hangout together; until we find out differently, I assume that this will be sufficient.

Finding information

Almost all of the above describes the process of the class. The topic of study for the class will be how to find information on the Web that is relevant and appropriate to the question at hand (specifically, business, industry, or career related). Of course, learning to be a competent user of Google’s search tools will be a starting point for the class; however, dozens (if not hundreds) of other tools are available that a well-informed student should be aware of and know how to use. (See the list below for the types of tools that we will be investigating.)

Managing information

The big problem in search used to be finding informational resources that were relevant to a particular query. That is no longer the case. Now the problem is finding too many such resources. Today’s student (and manager) must learn how to narrow down his/her search for more appropriate information and, then, know how to manage the seemingly never-ending flow of information to his/her desktop. During the course of the semester, students will be introduced to several different tools that should help the student stay on top of his/her information inventory.

Much of the course will focus on Web-based tools, but I plan on also introducing mobile tools when appropriate.

Specific topics discussed

Again, with the understanding that this list is provisional, here are the topics and types of technologies that I currently plan on discussing and introducing:

Wikis
Blogs
Web search techniques (4 days)
Resource quality evaluation
RSS (2 days)
Blog search

News search
Twitter (2 days)
Automation tools (ifttt & Yahoo Pipes)
Image search
Pinterest
Page monitoring

Research tools
Change notification
Video search
Social search (digg, reddit)
Metasearch
Custom search engine

Conclusion

Well, that’s it for now. If you’re a UM student, you should be able to sign up for this class in the usual ways. Even if you’re not a UM student, you should be able to use much of the information on the site (and interact with me to some extent). Here are some other thoughts:

If you are interested in getting some insight into the development of this course, follow me on twitter at drsamoore or read my blog.
If you’re excited about the course:
- If you’re a UM student, tell your friends about the course and get them to sign up.
- Send me a public tweet (include @drsamoore anywhere in the tweet except as the first characters) describing why — and use the hashtag #bit330 when referring to the course.
- Follow bit330 on twitter. This is the account I will use during the semester for all course-related information. Until that time I will periodically post more targeted status reports and other informational items on this account.
If you have questions about this course, send me an email at samoore@umich.edu. If you send me an email, put BIT330 in the subject line. (Or, of course, send me a tweet, either public or private.)
If you think I’m missing something that would make the course better, again, send me a public tweet describing what that “something” is.
Soon I will post a video that should give you some more insight into the course. Be on the lookout for an announcement within the next couple of weeks.

I hope this provides enough information to get you unnaturally excited about taking a class. I hope to hear from you soon!

Observations from Bingham and Connor’s The New Social Learning

I am currently reading The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Connor. This book is about enabling, supporting, and boosting the learning that is going on via social means of an organization’s employees. Of course, I am more interested in doing all of this for the students in my class, but I am hopeful that I will be able to transfer some insights from one context to another. As I have started to read it, I’m getting so many ideas; in this post I list of the ones from just Chapter 1 that excite me most; the emphases below are mine. I assume that longer posts will follow on some of these individual ideas (and on some from later chapters). This is not meant to be a review or to capture the important points from the book — this is just a set of my reactions to some of their ideas at the beginning of the book.

A student’s roles in a class

From p5: “We encourage you to use this book to discover how social media tools facilitate learning, how they might be leveraged to extend and expand your interactions with colleagues, and how to use them to create something vibrant. As Chris Brogan, one of the top bloggers in the world, coauthor of Trust Agents, and author of Social Media 101 says, ‘Focus on connecting with the people, and the tools will all make sense.’ ” — When designing my upcoming class, I continue to look for tools that enable connections at the right time, but I’m also thinking of how I can get across the idea to the students that they are supposed to support each other, to teach each other, to share with each other. They have been programmed from at least elementary school (and certainly at Michigan Ross with our enforced curve) that school is a competitive experience, that if you do better, then someone else has to do worse. I will have a strong tide to swim against.

The social basis of knowledge

From p7: “At its most basic level, new social learning can result in people becoming more informed, gaining a wider perspective, and being able to make better decisions by engaging with others. It acknowledges that learning happens with and through other people, as a matter of participating in a community, not just by acquiring knowledge.” — It has only been in the last few years that I have come to know this! (I’m a little slow sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time.) I have come to know that knowledge is an extremely social construct, that knowing something in some sense means knowing how to work with and through other people to get something done, that if you don’t have that level of knowledge, then you don’t really know something. If it’s possible to teach a class in a way that supports a discovery of this truth, then I will be looking for that way.

Technology for social learning

Social learning isn’t new. It has been going on since humans have walked the planet. We have used technology to support the process for at least 50 years (even though that’t not what it was called at the time). — Personally, I tend to get somewhat swept up in the latest technology. (If you know me, you know that I just said the equivalent of “The sun is hot.”) But I have been around long enough to know that this is true…at some level. The technology might have supported this process before, but it was only for people with a certain skills set or for people who worked in a certain industry. The technology now seems to be available and useful to a much broader segment of the population doing a much broader range of tasks. Given this, it seems like it would be useful to get students some experience with these tools sooner rather than later.

Social learning for higher ed

Social learning technologies “move services, assets, smarts, and guidance closer to where they are needed — to people seeking answers, solving problems, overcoming uncertainty, and improving how they work.” — This captures why I think social learning technologies would be useful for my class. I am not going to have all the answers; I want students to take ownership of some of the material and learn to share their own expertise; I want students to learn to reach out to a community for answers instead of just the supposed expert (i.e., me), even though that is what they have been trained to do all of their academic lives. Once they get into the work world, they will have to learn to operate in this generally ambiguous fashion. I figure I can start the process early for them in order to give them a leg up once they get out into the real world.

Social learning in my class

On p9 the authors explain what social learning is not, and this helped me clarify my thinking related to how I would use these technologies in my class:

It’s not at odds with formal education. By setting the students up with twitter accounts (that is, those that don’t have one already), I can enable them to share and seek information formally and informally (if that distinction even makes sense any more).
It’s not a replacement for training… That’s good, because I was still planning on using training videos and in-person experiences and online exercises in the class.

Appropriate testing

On p11: “The 21st century mind is a collective mind where we access what we know in our friends’ and colleagues’ brains. Together we can be smarter and can address ever more challenging problems. What we store in our heads may not be as important as all that we can tap in our networks. Together we are better.” — Testing a student’s ability to recall facts just seems silly in today’s world. What we need to be testing is a student’s ability to solve a problem using appropriate methods. More and more, “appropriate methods” include usage of the student’s personal network. Why? Because that is how they will address problems for the rest of their lives. It is a social world, and no student will ever be an island. (Except, apparently, if they sit in a classroom.)

Sharing expertise vs. enabling collaboration

On p19: “Learning can easily occur anytime, anywhere, and in a variety of formats. It always has, but now it’s codified and easy for others to see. These new social tools can enable organizations to strike a balance between surfacing the knowledge people need and giving them the ease and freedom to learn in a healthy and open way.” — Organizations have long worked to get employees to share their expertise so that others can build upon it. It seems to me that this new model of social learning has a bit different take on this. Efforts here are focused on getting employees to collaborate in problem solving, to draw them explicitly into the process so that their expertise can be used directly. The social tools should make it easier to reach out to these people, and to establish the true nature of the need for others to see (via an ongoing open, sharing practice).

Expanding the boundaries

On p20: “Learning is what makes us more vibrant participants in a world seeking fresh perspectives, novel insights, and first-hand experiences. When shared, what we have learned mixes with what others have learned, then ripples out, transforming organizations, enterprises, ecosystems, and the society around us.” — I want to make my class as valuable as possible. I want students to share what they have learned. I want people who are not in my class to be able to get a glimpse of the wonderful experiences we have shared in the class. I want students in my future classes to build upon the works and learning of my current class so that future students can go beyond where my current students are able to go. How? That’s a topic for a future post! But I think it’s a good goal, and one that is in reach.

How and when students learn

On p20: Some researchers in learning have found that “70 percent of learning and development takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving; 20 percent of the time development comes from other people through informal or formal feedback, mentoring, or coaching; and 10 percent of learning and development comes from formal training.” — This might be true because formal training only takes place 10% of the time; mentoring 20% of the time, etc. Or it might be that formal training provides knowledge that is not measured by these statistics. Or, most disturbingly, it might be that formal training hasn’t been imparting knowledge that is in any way useful. That would not be a happy interpretation of the data from my perspective. My personal takeaway from this is that I try to provide students with many opportunities to create tasks that both are personally relevant to them and apply theories and frameworks from the class I am teaching. I also try to give personal feedback as much as possible and create opportunities for students to give and receive feedback among themselves (if possible for the class); I have found that both teaching other students and learning from other students also help students retain information.

Class as a context for experimenting

On p21: “The new social learning, which centers on information sharing, collaboration, and co-creation — not instruction — implies that the notion of training needs to expand.” — This is a good summary of my motivation for working on this class. It provides a context to test my theories of learning and teaching, to see which facets of these processes can work in a digital environment and which require a blended approach.

Application of knowledge as a means for remembering

On p22: “Knowledge acquired but never put to use is usually forgotten. We may act as if we care about learning something and go through the motions, but we will forget it unless it is something we want to learn and it fits how we work.” — As I have taught over the years, I have learned this again and again. (Have I mentioned that I have a thick skull?) The concept of “covering the material” is nearly a meaningless phrase. Unless a student interacts with the concept, makes it somehow personally meaningful, it will be forgotten. Just because the teacher says the words doesn’t mean that the student heard them, understood them, or will ever even remember that they were said. Design a course so that the student has time to apply the concepts in a meaningful context. It is best if the student can construct that context; otherwise, what is perceived as meaningful to the professor can end up being perceived as irrelevant or confusing by the student. Not good. The question for the professor becomes how to come up with a way of managing all these different contexts during the learning process. Again, another question for another blog post.

Conclusion

That’s it for now. (As if that wasn’t enough, huh?)

As I said, this post is in no way a summary of the book, or even of this chapter. I hope it does, in some way, encourage you to read this book for yourself; as you can tell, I feel it has been worth my time. I would love to hear your take on some of the points above. I’m struggling with a lot of concepts, and juggling lots of balls. I need some of you to help me think through all of this.

Question related to twitter usage for a class

I have a question for which I need some help.

I have a twitter account drsamoore. I am planning to use twitter for a lot of the communication for my class. Let’s call this class BA001. I see at least a couple of options for handling these messages in twitter.

I could have students follow my account, and follow my student accounts. For all messages sent out by me or students related to the class, we could add the #ba001 hash tag. This would keep all of my communications in one place (so as to not create some type of multiple personality disorder) but I am also aware that I have a variety of different people who follow me (many of whom are not students). These people would probably not appreciate getting all of the communications that I send out related to the class.
I could create an account in twitter ba001. I could then have students follow this account, and this account could follow the student accounts. They could append @ba001 to any public message about the class or they could begin any private with @ba011. If I thought the answer to the private message was of interest to all the students, I could simply send out a message from the @ba001 account. This approach would usefully segregate my messages (from the point of view of many of my followers, I’m guessing) but it would cause me to have to think about which part of me was sending the message.

I really don’t know what to think. Is this a common dilemma that I am facing? If so, how do people handle this? I would love to hear your thoughts about this.

Tools for in-class group brainstorming and collaboration

In my last post I discussed my reasons for moving at least part of my case-based class to some in-class group brainstorming and/or collaborative work. The Web sites and tools that I am considering at first pass are the following:

Use case (or “how I think I want to use these tools”)

Here is how I envision using this tool in my introduction to business class. We generally begin a case discussion by answering some basic questions about the company and situation, and then try to identify the roots of the basic problem. Though these are straight-forward and expected questions, they tend to set an important foundation of common understanding for the rest of the discussion. A couple of problems tend to raise themselves here:

If the first student or two don’t get it, then the class can go off in the wrong direction for quite a while.
Only one or two students get involved in the initial discussion and get some buy-in on the case during this initial phase because this is generally a discussion with just a small number of students.

I want to have the students break into groups of 4-6 students and fill out a basic outline of information related to the case. Maybe I provide the outline or maybe they build it themselves. After 5 minutes of collaborative editing on the documents, each group would then also talk for another 5 minutes about what they have created, where they agree, and where they disagree. They would then post the document to the class Web site for all to see (so that I can learn their thinking about these cases). Then we could start the discussion. I assume that this would start from a better place and would allow us to have a more well-informed and directed discussion.

Desired features

Given the above I am looking for the following general features in this tool:

Multiple people editing the document
Ability to export the document to some archive format (PDF, RTF, or Word)
Ability to quickly re-organize a document
Show relationships among ideas
Ability to show high level view of relationships
Site licensing would be good, but free would be better
Ability to easily integrate with other tools and work habits
Works on multiple software platforms (Web, iOS, Android)
Works on multiple hardware platforms (laptop, cell phone, tablet)

Quick view

This table provides a quick overview of my impressions of each of these tools. Below I provide a more detailed discussion.

Tool	Multi edit	Export	Reorg	Relat	Hi level	Cost	Integr	SW plat	HW plat
Mindmeister	many	many	5	5	5	Edu discount, expensive	5	Web, iOS, Android	5
Edistorm	Unlimited	Excel, PDF	4	4	4	Edu discount, $49/yr	4	Web, iOS	4
Google Docs	Up to 50	Many	4	4	5	Free	5	5	4

More detailed discussion

Generally, each one of these tools could meet my needs. The choice of any one of them requires compromise. Overall, I found Mindmeister to be the clear features winner, but it is also clearly the most expensive tool by far. Google Docs is a tool that many people (and most of my students since we are now a Google Apps for Education campus) will be comfortable working in. Edistorm is a tool that I wanted to like more because I am definitely a “sticky-notes-on-the-wall” type of guy; in any case, it definitely still could work for many situations.

Mindmeister

This is a great application. It has so many features that it would take a while to get comfortable with them all but it still is basically straight-forward enough that a person could get comfortable with it during one session. I found its interface to be sleek, slick, and flexible. After creating a document, a user can then export it to just about any application that he might want to. It can also be directly integrated into the Google Apps platform, if desired.

As for the cost, currently the campus educational discount certainly helps. Let’s say that I have 60 students in my class, and my class lasts for 4 months. The cost for this period would be $240 — not an unreasonable amount, but certainly not inexpensive.

Edistorm

As I stated above, I am a sticky-notes kind of guy. I like working with a team standing around a space on the wall, each of us with our sticky notes, writing, pointing, placing and re-placing notes. It just works for me.

Edistorm works much the same way as this group sticky-note process (after your sign up for a free account, be sure to watch their brief introduction video; I wish I could give you a direct link, but they don’t provide one), but it has one drawback — it has a small screen to work with. If each student has a desktop with a 24″ monitor, I could see this tool working quite well; however, with the sticky notes themselves taking up a fairly significant footprint on the screen, it fairly quickly starts spilling over the edges of the screen so that you are then only able to see a subset of the sticky notes. The company is definitely aware of this as they provide lots of tools for working around this limitation. They have done a good job, but I think they need to take the next step and allow the sticky notes to automatically adjust their own size to fit the text. Maybe that would help.

Pricing here is much more reasonable. Only the administrator/teacher needs to pay in order for the students to work on a “storm” during a class. In order to get a reasonable amount of features, this means that the cost is $49/year, and this gets a teacher 2 currently active storms. It is quite reasonable that a teacher could have two different sections or classes using Edistorm without having to increase the cost. Quite reasonable.

Google Docs

Google Docs isn’t exactly a concept mapping tool (but it plays one in the movies…sorry) but its familiarity to students might allow them to become productive more quickly and with less “hassle.” GDocs is clearly a text-based tool that displays concepts hierarchically. It is clearly easy to move text from within a GDoc to another document, and these documents are viewable on just about any platform; however, as anyone who has tried to edit a GDoc on an iOS device knows, Google has not exactly done their best to integrate other hardware platforms into the application environment. I definitely would insist that students use a Web browser on a laptop or desktop instead of a tablet or phone — the functionality just isn’t there yet on these smaller devices.

Conclusion

I still have time before I need to make a final decision. I would like to use Mindmeister, but I need to make sure that I have the money for it. If not, then I would use Edistorm if they address the problem related to the size of the sticky notes. Finally, if neither of these options are available, then I will fall back on Google Docs; the functionality is there and students know how to use the application.

Now that I am relatively confident that these applications have the features that I need for this type of work, I need to think about what other uses they might have. But that will have to wait for now…

What do you think about these tools? Do you have any experience using them in the way that I describe? Did I miss anything? I would love to hear from you!

Moving from the Socratic method to in-class group brainstorming

In contrast to my writing so far on this blog, I teach one introduction to business class in which I don’s use any technology. I mean not any, unless you count a white board and pens as technology. It is a traditional Harvard-style case discussion class — three years ago I was tutored by two Harvard-trained professors in the method. I had never taught that way before, so it was quite a shock to me. No slides, no lecture, no pre-defined exercises…just discussion and the Socratic method. Yes, the teaching notes that I had written (along with my “board plan”) provided guide posts both for where I hoped the discussion would go and for the learning points that I wanted to discuss. But it is definitely a free-wheeling type of experience, one in which I really had to trust that my students would get us to the right place by the end of the class. I love the experience.

This last year I taught the class alone for the first time. I continued to teach case-based, but I made two slight changes. Both changes were in response to my observation about class participation. I have had between 52-68 students in any one section of this course. In any 3 hour session, each student can easily have 2 opportunities to make a significant contribution to the class. That’s in theory. In actuality, maybe 10% of the students barely ever say anything, no matter how much I coax them. Participation used to count 35% of the final grade, so a score of 25-50% on that portion would seriously hurt their final grade in the course. I don’t like this because I know these students have something to contribute, have something to teach the rest of us.

In response, this last year I cut participation down to 20% of their grade and added a blogging component (worth 20%) to their grade. This provided students with a different way of teaching and sharing with the rest of the class. While some students continued to have difficulty contributing during class, basically everyone seemed to do a good job with the blogs (which somewhat mitigated some low participation scores).

Those changes still doesn’t seem to be enough. I am still going to teach cases. I still think that students grow from the give-and-take that this method provides. I think the ability to speak clearly, to use evidence, and to defend one’s position extemporaneously are invaluable skills. Some students begin the term with so little confidence speaking to a room full of people (even though the group consists of their peers) that their voices shake with fear and nerves; many of these same students end the year with a vastly increased sense of value and confidence. I don’t want to take that away.

What I am thinking of doing is adding some group-based activities and discussions to the class. This might help those who need to try out their ideas in a smaller group. It also might allow more people to gain a better connection to the material since they wouldn’t have to wait for me to call on them — they could have their discussions and make their points within the small groups. I have always worried when there is group work and one transcriber who is responsible for putting the notes (that are supposed to reflect the group’s work) into the document. All too often, it ends up being that one person’s ideas. With some new software that is out there, I’m thinking of having small groups of students work together around a co-edited document, talking among themselves, working through ideas that appear, and preparing themselves to defend their proposal to the rest of class.

The Web sites and tools that I’m thinking about are the following:

Each feels slightly different and provides a different experience for the student. Have any of you had any experience with these in-class activities? If so, let me know in the comments.

Tomorrow I plan on writing about my explorations related to these three tools.

Using Twitter in a face-to-face class

I have previously used Twitter in my class with good results, but I found it more difficult to capture information from the class than I would have liked. I recently found another tool that actually makes my previously problems go away. In this post I describe what I did in my previous class, the problem I had, and the tool that is making my problem go away.

I taught a class on finding information on the Web (known as “BIT330”). Almost every day we had in-class lab exercises. Once every week or two I would ask the students to tweet their answers to certain questions or to tweet observations on specific tools (that I was particularly interested in, for instance). Part of the instructions in the class exercise write-up that I provided was to include #bit330 and some question identifier hashtag in the tweet.

The reason for tweeting with the hashtags was three-fold:

I used Twitterfall on a screen at the front of the classroom. I couldn’t recommend this tool more highly. It essentially is a live search; I would set up a search for #bit330 and then the tweets would slowly scroll down the screen (like a waterfall — get it?!) so that everyone in the class (including me, of course) could see the progression of students, the answers they were giving, the observations they were making, and the questions they had. This is a really cool addition to a class.
The second reason was that I could then capture the tweets and use them as part of my basis for establishing participation in the class. One time a student was logged on from home (or someplace other than class) and completed the exercises and sent the tweets.
The third reason was that I could capture the tweets and use them as a basis for learning about what exercises worked well, which needed fixing, and which needed replacing.

The trouble was that it was labor-intensive to get the information as the basis for points 2 and 3 above. I would run a search in twitter, and then I would repeatedly copy pages of tweets to a text file, and then I would use a short python program to turn the text file into a CSV file which is a better format as a basis for future computations (e.g., importing into a database file, as the basis for a word cloud, or whatever). This was all less than satisfactory.

The answer to all this is found in SearchHash (brought to my attention by the always-awesome Patricia Anderson). This tool will perform whatever search you want on recent tweets and will create a CSV file of the results. Problem solved!

It really is as simple as that. I can definitely see myself using this approach much more often in the future now that I know it’ll be so much easier to access the data.

What about you? Do you have any twitter-related tools that you use to support a face-to-face class? Or have you used these tools (successfully or not)? Share your stories!

Faculty uses for Google+ in support of teaching

I was looking through this presentation titled “31 Ways to Use G+ in Higher Education”, and I realized that this is quite significant to my life given the recent activities that the University of Michigan is taking in rolling out Google Apps for education. While I was on the Google Faculty Leadership Committee last year and I have something of a head start moving in this direction, I have not made many efforts to adopt the various parts of Google+.

The most promising of the tools that make up Google+ is Hangout. There are actually three different types of Hangout: Hangout, Hangout with Extras, and Hangout on Air. (Here is the page for help topics for Google Hangouts.)

Hangout: screen and document sharing among <= 10 people with accompanying video
Hangout with Extras: As far as I can tell, this is simply a Hangout plus the ability to name the Hangout, thus enabling invitees to more easily join the Hangout.
Hangout on Air: this is a limited feature version of a Hangout but with the added ability to broadcast the hangout to the world (via YouTube). Hangouts on Air (see this very useful video overview) provides an easy to use way to share videos with a wide audience. The best analogy that I can come up with is this: You are the performer in a small coffee shop who is broadcasting the show to the whole world. Just nine people can join you in the coffee shop (Hangout) but the the whole world can see the broadcast (On Air). In addition to being able to view the broadcast live, the video (which can later be edited) is automatically saved to your YouTube account.

The following describes my thoughts on how I might adopt these the different parts of Google+ in my classes. I list them in general order of my interest and probability of adopting them.

Hold virtual office hours in Google Hangout

I have generally held office hours in the Ross Winter Garden. It is easy for students to get to, my physical presence might serve as a reminder for students of my availability, previous students might stop by and say “hello,” and future students might come over for a chat. It is a win-win situation all around. Unfortunately, attendance at my office hours is sparse at best (other than the day before an assignment is due so I think it’s possible that another approach is needed.

It is always the case that some students can’t make it by during my office hours for whatever reason — they might be off-campus or they might have another meeting. I could use a Hangout a short couple of times a week even if I’m not on campus to meet with students when they are available — even one-on-one if necessary. For office hours a couple of days a week I could open a Hangout for 30 minutes or so in case students want to ask questions. While I have the Hangout window open, up to ten students at a time could attend.

A typical user of Google+ Hangout

Review a document with a student in a Hangout

You can start a Hangout with a particular student if you want to review his/her paper. You can share your screen with that student and point to parts of the paper while discussing it over video; if the document is a Google Doc, then you can actually collaboratively edit the document while in the Hangout. If you aren’t able to get together with a student for some reason, or if time is of the essence, then this certainly could be a useful tool to have available.

Hold meetings with distant teams

For student teams that you are working with (especially those located off-campus), using Google Hangout as a way to meet with the whole team seems like an easy and obvious win-win. Here at Michigan Ross, this should be particularly useful given out focus on action-based learning.

Use Hangouts on Air

I can see Hangouts on Air being useful mainly (probably due to a lack of imagination right now) if I had been asked to clarify a topic between classes and wanted to provide an answer before our next meeting. I could schedule a Hangout on Air broadcast for a specific time, up to nine students could join the Hangout, and then any other interested students could watch the broadcast on YouTube. I could also keep a chat window open at the same time so that anyone could ask questions.

Circles are definitely useful.

Create Circles as a quick way of sharing information with groups

I’m less sure about the usefulness of Circles. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a good concept — you know, wheels and all that. I’m just worried that students won’t want another stream of information to check during the day. However, if these do catch on, then faculty could use different Circles to share information with TAs, with specific teams or projects, or with the whole class.

No matter what I think about the usefulness of Circles per se, if a faculty member is going to use Hangouts, then he/she would definitely want to set up a Circle with all the students (plus TAs and graders) as members. This would enable a much easier way of targeting a Hangout to the class. The Circle can also be used to gather questions for the next lecture. It can also be used as a place to post answers to questions asked during office hours.

Use Google+Pages as a home page for the class

Finally, using Google+ Pages as a home page for the class is a convenience, again, if the class is going to have Hangouts (and an associated Circle). This provides a bit more clearly demarcated home for the class (and Hangouts and questions & answers); however, beyond that, I don’t see much functionality that attracts me. I have always appreciated having several separate streams of information that can be accessed (e.g., formal announcements from the professor, informal chat among class members, assignment announcements) and Google+ (Circles and Pages and Hangouts) are generally organized around one big stream of information — and it is actually called a Stream, so this isn’t a mistaken observation on my part. I still think there’s some need for a more structured course home page provided by a CMS or wiki (but, shockingly, I could be wrong).

Feedback desired!

What do you think about these technologies and their associated possibilities and pitfalls? I’m generally excited about trying some of them out on a larger scale (than just with my friends and family) but others of them I’m less sure. Is this something that you are excited about? Or does danger seem to be lurking?

Technologies for broadcasting your class

Last week at Enriching Scholarship here at the University of Michigan, Perry Samson — Thurnau Professor, founder of the Weather Underground, and co-founder of LectureTools — discussed a set of technologies for broadcasting your class. He uses these technologies to broadcast to remote students while other students are simultaneously in his classroom. I was so intrigued by his demonstration, I asked for, and today I received, a demonstration in my office by one of the sales people with the company. What follows are my impressions of the system, based on both his presentation and her demonstration.

These are the tools that Perry uses in his class:

These tools fit together well, but it was a bit confusing for me to get my head around. I’’ll try to give you a sense of what each piece does.

Splashtop is the easiest for me to understand, and the one that most people probably have the most immediate use for. At the most basic level, it mirrors your computer’s desktop on your iPad. In a classroom, it allows you to use your iPad as you walk around the room as the ultimate remote. You can control slide navigation while also being able to annotate the slides through your iPad’s interface. I never go anywhere without my Kensington wireless presentation remote; I appreciate being untethered from the lectern. However, walking around with the whole interface in my hands sounds like a real win-win.

LectureTools is more complicated to understand. This is a cloud-based service to which a professor uploads a PowerPoint or Keynote file. The professor, over the course of a semester, can upload all of his or her slides for a class. The service reads in the presentation file. In addition, the professor can insert what are called “interactive slides.” On these slides, the professor puts either a multiple choice question, a free response text question, a list of items (that students are to then rank order), an image (that students can point on), or a multimedia slide. At the appropriate time, the professor makes the slide visible to the class, and each student participates in the class by indicating an answer, writing a response, ordering the items, or pointing out an important part of the image. As the students are submitting their answers, LectureTools is collecting and/or summarizing these responses. The professor can them immediately share the students’ answers with the class and comment on anything interesting that pops up. This is quite a useful tool. It’s like a clicker on steroids.

Students, remote and local either log into the LectureTools Web site or use the iPad application to access the service. This gives the student access to a cloud-based copy of the presentation. This then gives the students the ability to do several things:

The student can take notes in a text area to the right of the slide area. These are not shared with anyone.
The student can draw directly on the slide; again, this information is not shared with anyone.
The student can type in a question that is immediately transferred to the professor’s dashboard. The student can see a list of all the questions (and associated answers, if the professor or an aide has provided any) that she has asked as well as those asked by other students. This ability to ask questions anonymously in this way has dramatically increased the number of students who ask questions during class according to the results of some experiments Perry has run.
The student can click on an icon to indicate that he/she is confused by the slide. The professor can see for any particular slide what percentage of students are confused.
The student can click on an icon to bookmark the slide if he/she thinks it is important to review later.

I found LectureTools to be a compelling tool. It is a bit rough around the edges, and is clearly still being developed, but I wouldn’t have any issues with using it in its current state in any class that I am presenting with PowerPoint or Keynote files.

Finally, Wirecast and Wowza are a program and a service that seem to go hand-in-hand. Wirecast allows the professor to produce live webcasts. You would either have to be fairly technically literate or have an assistant helping you out during a class, but this program would allow you to either broadcast from a classroom or anywhere on the road — on location at a company, in a hotel room, while interviewing someone at their work site…whatever you want. It’s a highly capable piece of software. Wowza is the service that broadcasts the stream to the Internet audience; it acts as the broadcast station on which your show (Wirecast) appears.

I can see the usefulness of a couple of these separately and all of them together. What alternatives are there? What am I missing? Have any of you had any experience with these, or competing, technologies? I would love to hear from you.