Author: egarofoli

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.


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

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.

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.

What’s the presumption?

Univeral Design in Higher Education
Universal Design in Higher Education

I am working on converting a typical syllabus into one that is in a universal course design (UCD) format. One of the standard sections in the UCD guide is called “Academic Honesty”, and it suggests you enter a link to the appropriate university policy if one exists. The course I am working one will be an offering in an online program, and I was surprised to find that the appropriate section  is entitled “Academic Dishonesty.” [emphasis mine]

I am aware that some people feel that too much is made of sematics, but in this case it makes me feel that the assumption in the policy is one of guilt rather than not.

Gen F. vs. Fortune 500

Facebook
Facebook

It strikes me that there are WORLDS apart from what is now being Generation F (Facebook Generation), and the Fortune 500. The very first characteristic held by Gen F is that all ideas compete equally. Seems to me it is the rare organization in which this is true, unless it is one recently formed by younger people.

Review the complete list of 12 characteristics yourself http://tinyurl.com/c4vld5
and see if you can figure out how those of us teaching in MBA programs can help bridge this gap.

Cloud Storage

Even though I told myself I was only going to blog one posting today, I can’t help but comment on Robin good’s article about how to send learge files w/o email.

I discivered the need to dor this kind of application a while ago when I needed to give people access to some Powerpoint point and other image files which were just too large for email too handle. Robing Good, who I love as a resource for a current and relevent take on what is happening in the today’s crazy [insane] world of communicaiton, has compiled a list of 15 different apps that provide the ability to

  • send large files quickly
  • store files online

I haven’t used any of the services Good writes about, but I have been using box.net as a location for file storage. I have often uploaded files that were too large to email, and then either gave selective access to people, or just uploaded files with open access for others.

I’d love to know if you have used any of the services and tools described in the article.