Archive for the ‘ technology ’ Category
Google Search Stories is a brilliant marketing strategy, but also fun to play with. I think it has some potential as a short exercise in the classroom for students to explore a concept. It helps one to think about a topic in a slightly different way.
Here’s my first attempt.
Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be invited to present at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Stellenbosch University. I chose Personal Learning Environment’s (PLE’s) as the topic, not because I knew very much about them, but precisely the opposite. Considering that my PhD research is inevitably going to make some use of this idea in some detail at some point, I used the presentation to explore the concept and to deepen my understanding of PLE’s.
Thank you to Francois and everyone else on the team for the warm welcome yesterday and for the opportunity to share my own experiences in this space, however limited they may be.
Here’s the abstract and presentation:
Note: The first part of the presentation tries to contextualise the conversation within the scope of current ideas around the changing nature of education and information technology. The second part of the presentation provides some insight into how I use certain services, devices and concepts within my own PLE. The final part briefly explores challenges within this approach and provides basic guidelines that may facilitate the implementation of a PLE nonetheless.
I’ve never really had the need to use Google Translate. Most of the content I come across is in English, and if it isn’t I’ve never read it and so never realised what I was missing out on. Earlier today I came across Ilona Buchem via a post from Stephen Downes, pointing out a presentation on PLE’s that she’d shared on Slideshare. The presentation led me to her blog, which was in German.
Chromium helpfully popped up a tab asking if the text should be translated from German into English, which I agreed to. After reading the first few posts, I decided that this was someone to include in my network. After clicking the RSS icon in the browser, it automatically imported the feed to my GReader account, again asking if this feed should always be translated into English.
Every so often I’m blown away by an elegant and intuitive solution to what was previously (for me, in this instance), an almost insurmountable obstacle.
How to Change the World: Ten Questions With Garr Reynolds
Evidence of Effectiveness « Teaching Professor
1. Develop and test activities through multiple classroom iterations. Try it more than once! See if the same outcome occurs. See if some minor alternations make it even more effective.
2. Collect evidence from multiple sources, such as students and outside observers. Yes, your opinion as to whether and how well something worked counts, but verify what you think happened by collecting information from students. They don’t always experience things the way we think they do. Ask a colleague or a professional from the teaching center to come to class and observe and report what results they’re seeing.
3. Collect evidence using multiple methods. Most of us don’t evaluate what students know by only using multiple-choice methods. So our instructional alternations ought to be assessed with multiple methods—qualitative, quantitative, descriptive, and so on.
4. Tie evidence to learning objectives. Why did you try the new activity? Is it an attempt to better reach one of your learning objectives for the course? Usually changes are, which makes it natural to judge their effectiveness by looking at evidence documenting how well they accomplish the learning objective.
I was recently asked about my views on the credibility of Wikipedia as an academic resource, and soon realised that the question isn’t an easy one to answer. Since Wikipedia was launched in 2001, academics have generally decided that it’s suspicious at best, and many responded to students’ use of it with blanket bans on the site. I’m not going to try and weigh in on that debate here, or to cover it’s history, except to mention the Nature study that compared Wikipedia to Britannica (here’s an in-depth summary of the controversy that emerged). You can also read about the reliability of Wikipedia, but you have to make up your own mind about the credibility of articles about Wikipedia that are created using Wikipedia. My comments are around the use of Wikipedia as a source of content, and not as a platform for discussion or collaborative learning, and to take it further, I’m only considering the encyclopedia, and not any other associated Wikimedia properties.
I think it’s difficult to talk about the academic credibility of Wikipedia in general, only to say that some articles are brilliant, and others not so much. It’s kind of like saying that some cars are more fuel efficient than others, or that some teachers are better than others. Wikipedia is a collection of articles that have many, many authors of diverse backgrounds and motivations, and some of those articles are credible, while others are not. I personally encourage the use of any resource that can help my students, either as a starting point, or as a primary source that can be referenced.
The key (in my view anyway) is in teaching students and colleagues how to tell the difference between something that can serve as background information, and something that is an authoritative, credible voice. This in itself is a problem because articles on Wikipedia are composed of many voices, and so make authorship impossible to establish. Traditionally, academics have valued the voice of an expert who has been established over time through peer-reviewed publication. They find it hard to accept that the group may be just as credible as the individual.
In the previous paragraph I mentioned the importance of also teaching colleagues how to recognise online credibility because I’ve found that they generally fall into one of two camps:
I don’t know how to get around this.
There’s also a psychological block against the fact that it can be edited by anyone. There’s an assumption that because an article can be corrupted by vandals, it will. An analogy would be to assume that everyone in a restaurant is armed and dangerous because they have a knife and should be locked in cages to prevent them from harming other customers. My response is to highlight the advantages of the “anyone can edit it” approach, and take a phrase from open source software development: “With many eyes, all bugs are shallow”, meaning that when enough people are looking at a problem, it becomes easier to solve. Mistakes are corrected and the resource grows more quickly than if the system was built around bureaucratic bottlenecks.
In conclusion, I would suggest that the tools you choose as an academic should depend on what your objectives are. If you’re looking to “prove” that Wikipedia should / could be used, it’d be easy to find a very credible article as an example. But that would be a weak argument because someone else will just as easily find a terrible article. I try to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia (or any other online resource) and let people make their own decisions. I used to try and convince people of the error of their ways but quickly realised that they often weren’t ready to listen. I got a great comment on another post that spoke about “warming people up to the concept”, which is really what we need to be doing. This is a not a shock and awe campaign, it’s a stealth mission using guerilla warefare.
I guess that in response to the question, I’d say it’s a bit like Schrodingers cat in that Wikipedia both is, and at the same time, isn’t, credible as an academic resource. You have to open the box to find out.
I’ve been going through the collection of abstracts from last year’s HELTASA conference, looking for a citation for a poster presentation that I’d like to use for an assignment. This gave me an overview of the event that I didn’t pick up on while I was there, as I tend to focus on individual presentations while at conferences.
One of the other things I noticed is that when talking about e-learning (besides the fact that there are many interpretations of what e-learning actually means), many presenters spoke of a move towards customised Learning Management Systems, that exist separate to the lecture. There is still a clear demarcation between the classroom and the online space, with little in each space to complement the other. The only thing that changed in some cases was the way in which learning tasks are assigned and marks gathered i.e. how learning was managed.
I think there’s still a strong belief that “teaching with technology” merely involves moving content online and into digital walled gardens, cut off not only from the greater online community, but even from students who aren’t registered for that particular module. There seemed to be a lack of understanding that the most important aspect of introducing technology into teaching, is that there must be a change in practice that is associated with multiple, bi-directional communication channels. Even the addition of multimedia shouldn’t be seen as an end in itself…it’s just a way to add meaning to the message.
This change in communication is what is fundamental. It’s about moving ideas, as well as moving between and through them in a way that’s difficult to do in a traditional lecture format, but which complements the lecture (or small group discussion, etc.). We need to move away from the idea that integrating technology into teaching practice is an either – or proposition. The traditional and the new need to blend into each other, using each strategy to reduce the limitations of the other.
Up until today, I was kind of maintaining 2 blogs…this one, and a reflective commentary that I included in my teaching portfolio wiki. The portfolio is something that our faculty suggests we keep for when we apply for promotion, etc. but I thought it could be something more. So when I started teaching in 2007, I thought about putting all of my teaching-related activities online in a public wiki, both for my own archiving purposes and for anyone else who might find it useful / interesting. Over time, it grew to become a portal to some of what I’m interested in. For example it’s also where I document my PhD progress, and my Open Textbook project. I’ve decided that since I was essentially doing the same thing in 2 places, albeit with subtle differences (evident only to me), it was time to post those reflections on teaching practice in one place, which from now on will be here.
One of the resources I enjoy most is the Tomorrow’s Professor blog, which is almost always a great starting point for a few minutes of reflection. I’ve just finished reading this post on improving the teaching of poor teachers, taken from the book A Guide to Faculty Development: Practical advice, Examples, and Resources by Ann F. Lucas.
One of the first points made is that poor teachers will often externalise the blame for underperforming students, often citing low student motivation or high teaching loads as the reasons for this. Effectively, this frees the lecturer from any responsibility to improve. When I first started teaching, I remember clearly how my tendency was also to look outside of myself for the problem, and it was only with a great deal of personal honesty that I could admit to myself that I wasn’t always doing a very good job. Having no teaching experience other than the teaching I was subjected to, I had taken on the role that had been modeled to me as a student, with most of my colleagues having the same viewpoint. There was no incentive to change teaching practice, especially not at the expense of research activities. This is changing at UWC though, with both grassroots programmes and upper management policies rewarding a scholarship of teaching and learning.
When you think about the misguided notion that knowledge of a subject conveys some kind of ability to teach it, you begin to understand how deeply entrenched is the centrality of content in a standard curriculum. What the universities are saying is that you don’t need to be able to teach in order to transmit content, an idea that is hardly ever challenged by our students, who seem to accept (and expect) that their experience of higher education will be a continuation of the previous 12 years of learning. Maybe that’s because the voice of the student is often missing from conversations on improving teaching practice? To address this issue in our department, we’ve taken steps to not only formalise our student feedback process, but to implement it in a way that facilitates engagement with that feedback by eliminating the more repetitive tasks associated with it e.g. data capture and analysis. I believe that if students are give the opportunity to be more involved in the teaching and learning process, to see their concerns addressed and suggestions valued, they may move to a space where the rewards for their participation are clear to them, and are no longer things that need to be externally motivated.
However, giving students an authentic voice means having to address them. I’ve had a few students openly reject the idea that they are at university to exercise their minds, and that instead, I should just pour forth the knowledge they require to be good physiotherapists. In these situations, it’s all too easy to throw your hands in the air and shout: “Why should I care if they don’t”? But isn’t the whole point of the job to guide students to a place where where their preconceived notions of education and the world are challenged? If we’re not up to the challenge, should we rather consider employment elsewhere?
I just got my invite for Google Wave and I feel like a little kid with a new toy, only I don’t know what the toy is, or how it works, or what (if anything) I’m supposed to do with it. Apparently I’m not alone (keep hitting Refresh to get different comparisons). I’m not going to try and describe Wave, because others have done that to death. I’m more interested in the educational use case/s, which I’ll try to discuss briefly.
Possible use cases in higher education
I read a comment from a high school student that Wave could be the one “master notebook” that all students could contribute to and validate. I’m thinking of the subject readers that we hand to students in the beginning of the module…hard copies and difficult to modify. How about using Wave for each course reader, with staff commenting on improvements, and students making contributions? Images and video can be embedded into the Wave. Does anyone know if data can be exported from the wave, and if so in what formats? I’m sure that with Wave being an open platform, it’s only a matter of time before writes an extension that allows users to export content in a variety of formats.
To take this further, how about using Wave as a curriculum template, with physiotherapy educators and students from around the country working collaboratively to maintain and improve a standard curriculum? Not everyone would need to teach or learn from the same modules, but everything could be available as “extras”. We could even include additional modules that are not necessarily part of the curriculum but that students (and staff) might find useful. For example, as part of their final year, our students must complete a research project that involves working with large documents. Most of them have little or no experience with this and lack the skills to automate the more tedious tasks (many of them create Tables of Contents manually). Other problems are teaching them effective search strategies using multiple online sources and methodologies, which will be immensely helpful for them but which will definitely not be approved as part of the official curriculum. Using Wave to design the curriculum seems like a great opportunity to be innovative and dynamic in what we can provide for our students.
Planning conferences also seems like an area that Wave would be useful, not only for conference organisers, but participants. You could submit abstracts into the wave, with the potential for comments and feedback directly. Imagine submitting an abstract and being able to have a conversation with participants (or those unable to attend) before and after the conference? Maps and venue photos could also easily be placed within the wave.
Surveys and feedback mechanisms seem like a useful fit for Wave, which is essentially a collaborative authoring environment. Students could begin waves on topics they find challenging, or even departmental procedures that they find problematic. Other students’ comments would aggregate in the wave, lecturers could respond and (hopefully) resolutions found through discussion. I have come across this collection of posts that discuss the use of Wave as a scholarly document editor, and the conclusion seems to be that it isn’t that promising, at least at this early stage.
Challenges
The user interface for Wave has been called “universally confusing” and makes me wonder how our students will engage with it. I have enough trouble trying to teach colleagues and students about blogs (forget about micro-blogs) and wikis, without trying to talk about waves too. Not all of our students have internet access at home (although everyone has access on campus), which would almost certainly place some students at a disadvantage.
Additional resources to help you figure out if Wave in education is useful, or a load of hype:
I just came across a pretty cool feature of Chromium…keyword searches. I know that this idea isn’t new, and now that I know about it, it’s clearly documented in the Google Chrome help pages, but I’ll put up some screenshots anyway.
You begin by typing the URL of the site you’re going to (Chromium will suggest the search you might be looking for):
Press Tab to bring up the site specific search option in the address bar:
Chromium will a few suggestions that might be useful to you:
I noticed that Chromium tells you it’s using a keyword to make the suggestion, which made me think that there must be a way to edit your preferences for what the keyword for each site should be. A short search later showed that it’s actually pretty easy (although not necessarily intuitive) to edit the keywords. Right click anywhere in the address bar and choose “Edit search engines”. In the screenshot below you can see that I’ve changed my keyword for a Wikipedia search from en.wikipedia.org, to wp.
You can find some more useful tips on working with Chromium at The power users guide to Google Chrome, from Lifehacker.