Kesmit-ing: The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas

Kesmit-ing: The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas.

Take a look at this very creative way to get students in a fairly large class (90 students) actively involved in the course. The instructor makes use of Twitter as a primary instructional strategy in the course.

In her own words, “I set up a course schedule that followed a standard formula most weeks. On Mondays and Wednesdays I delivered traditional lectures covering important terms and concepts. Fridays were reserved for the “twitter experiment.” The idea was to set up all of the students on twitter while they were in class and have them post discussion ideas/questions and respond to each other using twitter. Students were required to complete a reading assignment prior to class every Friday. The readings included historical essays and primary documents that related to the lectures I had given on Monday and Wednesday. I provided a list of reading suggestions and questions on my website to help students read effectively and take helpful notes on the readings. At the beginning of class on Fridays, I gave an open-note quiz based on the assigned readings and the web questions. After the quiz, our twitter discussions began.”

This is definitely worth checking out.


Blended Learning Web Resource from Simmons College

With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Simmons College has launched the website Blended Learning at Simmons College:

In addition to serving as a resource for Simmons faculty and students, the site is designed to help schools around the country make a successful transition to blended learning. The site includes information and resources for use in planning, implementing, and assessing the effectiveness of blended programs. In particular, we encourage you to check out five case studies that include video interviews with Simmons faculty, course simulations, and blended course planning exercises. In coming months, additional online case studies and resources will be added to the site.

In addition to the resources they’ve created and provided, which are very good (explore the site to see), I’ve included their external resources list below, as there is some great content on these sites definitely also worth exploring:

Teaching and Learning Centers
Course Quality Checklists
  • Quality Matters
    An inter-institutional quality assurance process for online and blended courses.

Uploading a Flip video to Blackboard – Duke Digital Initiative

At our SBS Undergraduate Online Teaching Best Practices workshop this past Friday, May 1, we experimented with new Flip video cameras, but had difficulty getting them the videos to show in Blackboard.

Well, Woo Hoo!

Not only did I find an existing online resource to guide us through uploading a Flip video into BlackBoard, IT WORKS! If you open this YouTube video from the Duke University Digital Initiative on one half of your screen, and then have your Flip video software open on the other half of your screen, I’ll think you’ll find it easy enough to work through the process of uploading a file, step at a time.

Uploading a Flip video to Blackboard – Duke Digital Initiative.

Give me a holler if you need some help.
~Elaine

Using Copyrighted Materials in Education: Fair Use Guidelines for Educators

I’ve written about Fair Use before, but thought I’d bring up the topic again since the summer online courses are about to get under way.  Often, faculty wonder whether their use of copyrighted materials in the classroom constitutes Fair Use or not. Making a Fair Use argument is not always easy, especially when so many draconian interpretations of copyright law exist.  But Fair Use is part of copyright law, even though it is little understood (and poorly spelled out).  I hate to see faculty forgo valuable lesson plans for fear of using copyrighted material that’s essential to the curriculum.  But often they do, or they are “quiet” about the uses they make (particularly audio and video) for fear that they may be doing something wrong, when quite often they are not.

Three and a half years ago, the Association for Independent Film Makers got together and defined their own industry guidelines for Fair Use.  In the absence of case law regarding Fair Use, judges often look to common industry practices to determine whether a use of copyrighted work falls under the Fair Use doctrine or not (and such information is not always available or easy to find).  Having a written set of documented principles and guidelines is useful for both practitioners and courts in determining whether a use is fair or not.  

Finally, this past November, after a year of study and collaboration, educators released their own “Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education“. (Download the Code of Best Practices here.)

Below is a clip they’ve put together on the topic:

 
Here’s a short video on The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy from a talk given at American University’s Center for Social Media:

 

Following are the Five Principles in the code above, with Descriptions and Limitations:

ONE: EMPLOYING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN MEDIA LITERACY LESSONS

DESCRIPTION: Educators use television news, advertising, movies, still images, newspaper and magazine Continue reading “Using Copyrighted Materials in Education: Fair Use Guidelines for Educators”

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: How Distracting are Social Media Tools?

 

PARC
PARC

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: How Distracting are Social Media Tools?.

“…during one presentation at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Boston, Raluca Budiu, a user-experience specialist for the Nielsen Norman Group, asked the audience whether typing in tags for articles would help them remember key concepts. The answer, according to her research, is no. Users remembered less after typing in tags than after simply reading an article online.”

I have never thought much how I use tags; someimte I do and sometimes I just want to be bothered. And since I have never reflecyed about it, I never paid much attention to how useful the act of tagging is.

I was quite surprised to read the outcomes of once researcher’s work in which she discovered that becuase the act of adding tagsreduces the amount of time that the user is paying attention to the actual content of the article itself.

More of Raluca Busiu’s work centers on discovering ways in which to minimize the human cost of participating in social media. She talked about a tagging system that “lets users click words in an article to create tags, rather than typing them in at the end.”

This simple change in workflow supposedly improved a user’s recall ability.

This makes me wonder about the degree of signifigance in the improvement; what exactly was the user able to recall after using this new system called SparTug.us than before.

This has me intrigued enoughto check out the new tagging system. But what is your experience been with respect to tages?

  • Do you use them?
  • If so, why?
  • What are the ways in which you make use of them?

PS – You will notice that I have used tagged this entry with both a Category and a tag…….

Distance Education student services

There is an article in this morning’s Inside Higer Ed entitled “Rise In Distance Enrollments” that talks about this trend in community colleges.  Part of the article includes the results of a national survey taken by these institutions that describes the current status of student services for distance education at community colleges.

While we are a private, four-year university, it still seems that many of the results paralleled our situation here in Boston.  For example the most pressing pressing challenge is how to assess student learning, certainly an ongoing quest.  A surprising finding to me was that only 18% of faculty reported using the packages of course materials that are provided by publishers; 80% of colleges reported using their own materials.

While I have no quantitative data to cite, I imagine that our rate of using publisher-provided materials is higher, and if so, I wonder if it is because tenure track professors must show evidence of publishing, service, and teaching. One’s time in a four-year institution may be spread among more expectations and responsibilities.

i welcome comments on this, as I am just speculating.

Quality Online Video Sites for Education

In light of YouTube’s recently launch of “YouTube Edu“, I figured I’d compile a list of the best sites for educational use. (I’ve seriously thought about aggregating our own on wpmu with a premium WordPress template like On Demand, which looks like a Hulu or WordPress tv. and can aggregate content from many user-based video services). At any rate, I’d love to grow the list with some feedback as to what else is out there. So far, the list is short, though the content in all is vast:

YouTube Edu
YouTube’s videos and channels from college and university partners

Fora.tv
Videos on the people, issues, and ideas changing the planet

Big Think
Interviews and insight from the world’s leading experts in business, entertainment, education, religion, and politics

Academic Earth
Thousands of lectures from the world’s top scholars

iTunes U
Free lectures, language lessons , audiobooks, and more

11 Software Applications for Podcasting

A list of software resources for audio and video capture, creation, and production.  Of course, you still need to host your podcast somewhere, but we’ll explain more about that later…

Windows

picture-56.pngAudacity
Record, edit and produce audio podcasts
Price: Free

picturecam.pngCamtasia Studio
Screencasting – Record anything on your screen as a movie
Price: $299 (retail)

picture-63.pngSnapkast
Record and podcast your Powerpoint presentations
Price: $79

icon_mpeg4.gifQuickTime Pro
Record, import, edit and compress audio and video
Price: $29

Continue reading “11 Software Applications for Podcasting”

portable storyboards

OK, this has got to stop! But I can’t help but find out sort of information that I think could be of use to people, and like my mother, I cannot help but pass it on. I got this from reading Cliff Atkinson’s blog. Atkinson is the author of the book Beyond Bullet Points who now has added a blog and website to his holdings.

So here is a funky little tool called  pocketmod.com which allows you to make and print a very small notebook from a single sheet of A4 (letter-size) paper. You get 8 sections to put different designs on (grid, lines, schedule etc.) and one of the designs is a storyboard layout (within the “Writing Guides” folder).

It’s wild. I tried it, went to the YouTube video to watch (a couple of times), how to put the thing together. Now of course, the question is whether or not I would ever use such a tool. It’s not the fact that it’s so retro, but I have a tendency to loose things, and carrying around a small piece of paper like this is probably not going to work. What do you think?

Power in the Networks

I am currently faced with the need to train faculty who are new to teaching online and/or to BlackBoard, the CMS we use here.  And since there has been little, if any, training with respect to online pedagogy even though there have been master’s level courses online for several years, I also do not know the degree to which online best practices are being adhered.

I read a thought-provoking blog posting today called “Communities, PLEs, small groups, & power, in a blog entitled Adventures in Corporate Education or, how my graduate studies are affecting my job in corporate education.

From my perspective, the author makes two critical points. The first point centers around the idea that learning occurs via social interaction, which often happens when finding and creating our own networks and communities. She further states that communities are recognizable by a set of norms to which all help create and then adhere. To know “the rules” is to be an insider.

The author then quotes Manuel Castells,

… in this network society, power continues to be the fundamental structuring force of its shape and direction. But power does not reside in institutions, not even in the state or in large
corporations. It is located in the networks that structure society….

As an educational technologist and instructional designer, I completely agree with the author when she says “we have to figure out how to empower members and learners to create a dedicated connection to the community we have built.  We have to look at how the controls we put in place (you know, that list of stuff that defines our community) interact with the characteristics of groups [of students] with whom we have invited to connect.

I also concurr with the blog author that we as faculty or learning designers need to be cognizant of the need to:

  1. create a learning community in an online learning opportunity
  2. recognize the power of the online community
  3. design learning activities that will increase the likelihood that members of the course deciding are able to manage conflict and meld into a learning community.

Misbehaving

I followed a recommended link from one of the people who I follow on Twitter (one of the speakers I met at a recent computer conference who was also tweeting the ongoing sessions) and ended up here:

Bb for the iPhone or iTouch

When I heard that BlackBoard was making available a free app for the iPhone and iTouch, I thought it sounded like it might prove to very useful to students to enable them to check in on their course(s) while away from their computer.

So I went to iTunes this morning to download the app, and unfortunately, didn’t read the reviews until after  the download. Here are a couple of snippets from a host of comments:

“I don’t really understand the point of this app. It doesn’t really display any real or useful data. You can use the app to browse clear down to individual grades for example , but then if you want to see the grade, it takes you to Safari where you have to go through the tedium of logging in and using the small iPhone screen to try to navigate…”

“Documentation is poor. Impossible to find PIN# or any resources to “sign up for Bbsync.” Apparently many options in the app are simply pointers to web links. As primitive and poorly conceived as the web apps. ”

In fairness, there were some positive reviews such as:
“This app has great potential and that’s why I’m giving it three stars (out of 5). I have access to both Student and Instructor accounts using Bb Server v. 8.0.375.0 While I connect and sync multiple times using the Student account, my Instructor account gives me an “unknown error every time.”

“Don’t review it like you’ve emptied your bank account to download this. It’s not bad. Make sure you go on Bb on your computer and pick up your iPhone BbSync PIN so you can login. If you can’t see your stuff, that’s your school’s fault, not BlackBoard….That said this app could be much better”

So obviously the jury is still out, and may require one to go through the process of trying it for oneself.