facultycomputing

What's with iPads?

2012-07-18T13:53:00.001-04:00

Every few years there's a new consumer technology product that makes a wave in the public consciousness. Some of them make a huge difference to faculty and students; some of them don't. How to tell the difference?

I've never seen any tool that by its very existence changed the nature of teaching. It's not true of slates and chalk, it's not true of ballpoint pens or pencils, it's not true of television, and it's not true of iPads. What I have seen is that some tools change the way people live and interact.

If a tool changes the way people live and interact, then I always ask: why aren't they teaching and learning while they're doing what they want to do with that tool? Or, to flip it the other way: how can we teachers hijack that tool to use it for teaching and learning purposes, since the tool is obviously very popular with our students?

Every technology innovation has innate capabilities that distinguish it from what came before. Some of the changes are very small; some are huge. In every case, those innate capabilities are what the customers want to exploit, whether or not educators feel that they should. It's always good to ask: can we exploit those capabilities for the purposes of education?

Laptops let people have access to computers and communication networks anywhere; people didn't have to be tied to desks any more. Phones put the same level of access in a pocket. And iPads are something in the middle, with large bright screens and connectivity and something most laptops don't have: a touchscreen.

How are iPads changing the way people live and interact? They are awesome media consumption devices. Reading the newspaper, watching video, listening to music, reading email, surfing the web - the iPad does all these things really well. The form factor is such that they are easy to use almost anywhere (though for small hands or hands with arthritis, they're a bit heavy to hold up; the new folding cover addresses that somewhat).

iPads are also undeniably status symbols. Apple products have become markers of status and good design; you pay for the Apple brand both because it's a better quality product and because it looks cool. There are plenty of tablets out there running competing operating systems, most often Android. I've tried these myself and have yet to see one that behaves as smoothly, as "intuitively", as the iPad itself.

(I always put "intuitively" in quotation marks, because most technology products train humans far more effectively than humans train them, and really it's a question not of human intuition but of how quick and easy is it for the device to train us in how to use it. The iPad is very good at this.)

The status symbol thing hurts iPads, at least in higher ed, as much as it helps; some students still feel self-conscious when they take an iPad out in class, and since most students still don't have one, their use attracts attention. This may fade as more students get tablets, if they do, and more students start bringing them to class, if they do.

So, it looks hot and it lets people consume media, all types of media, anywhere, anytime.

What the iPad doesn't do particularly well is let its user create things. I would like to be able to type text, take pictures, take videos, make audio recordings, and share those things with other people. The iPad isn't great at this. Its interface is not geared toward making and sharing files. Even the existence of files on it is largely protected from the user, and you need to add a tool like Dropbox to it if you want to easily share files to or from the device.

I've been using an iPad for years now, not because I love it, but because I want to understand it, and because it has serious fans in our faculty and students. I still haven't settled on when is exactly the right occasion to take it and not a netbook, or a Kindle, or a phone. So I'm not an evangelist.

For me the iPad would never get used if it weren't for two things: Dropbox, and my capacitive stylus. The former lets me use it to read documents I've saved in Dropbox, so there is instant synchronization across my home and work computers, and the iPad gives me access to those documents in meetings. The capacitive stylus (along with Penultimate - three things?) lets me handwrite notes in meetings and immediately send them to myself, others, or Dropbox - a handy feature for someone like me who always struggles with paper and prefers to have everything electronic, and always available, at all times.

So how is the iPad good for teaching?

As an e-book it's interesting but not revolutionary. It's not a major change to be able to add animation or video to books; laptops have long been able to do this, and one can do it on any website. But combined with the form factor, it may be an incremental change that nonetheless makes a big difference in the classroom. It is a device that is as small and easy to carry as a book that facilitates full color video and animation, and we know those tools help students understand and retain new concepts and new information. In classrooms where this activity needs a boost, iPads may be an extremely valuable tool. They are expensive items, more expensive than I would like them to be if they were going to be widely adopted, but they do do this well.

Critical thinking skills, however, are developed through students' processing information and synthesizing it into new forms. When students write papers, make videos, even create art collages, they take what they know and put it into their own "words" and share it with others, and in this way they learn and understand and retain that understanding.

I find an iPad to be a poor creation device for my own concepts and the media in which I want to convey them. I can't easily write a paper on it, much less make a video or an audio piece. Since my own teaching focuses more on critical thinking skills, the iPad is not that inviting to me. But if I were teaching in a field where retention of new information and understanding definitional concepts were necessary, the iPad might be great. I could write or adopt a textbook where videos illustrated mitosis and linked to definitions throughout the text, and students could all easily use it in class or anywhere, without having to open up a laptop. Games can also be written that reinforce concepts (though the lack of Flash support holds back education here, as we have long been Flash-oriented for games), and any repetitive tool like flashcards can have all the benefits of being connected to the network but also enhanced with multimedia.

So, skills- and information-based learning, enhanced by iPads; critical thinking and synthesizing skills, not so much.

I'm not saying that's a reason to eschew them. They are what they are. But it's important to remember they were never designed to take the place of computers or phones. They are a new consumer item category, even quite different from their closest cousins, the e-readers. I personally love to read on a Kindle, but find it awkward to do so on an iPad, which is so much larger and has a screen that isn't daylight-friendly. But I read a fair bit on my iPad, while I'm also checking email, checking the web, and doing other consumption tasks, because it syncs with Dropbox and because it lets me really surf the web in full color and full media like a laptop, but is easy to carry and has a touchscreen like a phone.

I love reading my email, for instance, on my iPad. It's a brilliant one- or two-touch disposal method for each message: file, or delete. No mousing. But when I have to stop and respond to an email, now it's a pretty arduous typing process. Could I get an external keyboard? Sure; but at that point, why not switch to a computer with a keyboard?

Bottom line: should the average teacher be interested in iPads for teaching purposes? If better information retention on a particular topic is your goal, maybe. Does every student have one and is teaching going to look antiquated if it doesn't involve them? Not yet, and maybe not for a while. They are ancillary devices to computers and always will be. On the other hand, they're easier to carry and may very well seriously boost the electronic textbook market. If we reach a point where 99% of our students have them, and we can close that gap with an iPad requirement which, like a laptop requirement, ensures that even international and first-generation college students have the device, then they could make it easy for faculty to share video or animations, poll the students on their thoughts or do problem-solving, and do touch-based creation, even with math or non-Roman character alphabets that are often hard for new students to tackle with keyboards.

Should the average teacher be interested in iPads for their own use? Maybe. I know faculty who have used iPads to revolutionize their own attendance-taking (perhaps a small issue, but if it's not small for you, you know how big it can be!), accessing their own files more easily, and keeping up with the communications of a class or with committee work. If it works for you, it works for you. Hopefully I've described what it can or can't do well enough to let you decide about whether or not to buy this device for yourself if you haven't already.

Are there particular teachers who really must be interested in iPads? For computer science the mobile OS has become a whole interesting new topic; the ability to use the touchscreen anywhere has resulted in some great new art applications that are interesting to some; and the new videoconferencing capabilities in the latest models are neat (though no different from what many phones offer) and might provide a nice channel for communication for distance learning teachers who want to do one-on-one meetings. The next big revolution may be the ability to annotate a paper, including with handwritten notes as well as audio or video from you, and returning it to the student; they're very close with this, though I think they're not there yet. If this is a feature you're dying for, I'd suggest checking out the iPad apps that move in this direction.

Otherwise, for the average teacher, I would say it's far more important to understand phone culture than to understand iPads per se. If you don't have a smartphone or if you don't use your phone as anything but a phone, you don't understand how it's revolutionized the life of the average college student from what it was even five years ago, and you probably need to. Always-there communication networks are a very big difference and they can really be exploited in interesting ways for education: to facilitate group learning, to extend the walls of the classroom or flip it, to really change the day-to-day operation of the class. In almost every instance that I can think of, an iPad will work for these things - but so will a phone or a laptop, and in every case you'll want the features of the laptop to let students really create work (developing those crucial critical thinking skills) or you'll want the I-always-have-it-with-me capability of the phone. Both laptops and phones have far more penetration into the market, as well, and teachers would have far fewer problems adopting them than trying to do an exercise with their students that depends on everyone having an iPad. Pools of iPads are being tried at many schools but these are expensive (both to acquire and in terms of staff time to maintain), and it looks to me like what laptops looked like before everyone had one.

You're right to think that this will probably change, though, and no one knows how quickly. "More quickly than laptop ownership changed" is probably a safe guess.

Our average student now has around three wireless devices - and this happened very quickly, in less than eighteen months. iPods, iPads, handheld games, fixed game boxes, and e-readers are all adding to the mix of devices our students buy and use every day - in addition, if I have to say it, to their phone and their laptop. The way our students use technology affects their lives and is important to educators if we want to reach them where they are and where they will be for the rest of their lives. Understanding the iPad itself isn't as critical as understanding this always-on, always-connected lifestyle - and if possible injecting some process of learning into that lifestyle.

Share your ideas - Faculty Computing highlights innovators we know about in the online gallery of innovators, but we also host an iPad user group - contact me (judith.tabron at the usual hofstra.edu) if you want me to put you in touch with that group, and come share your ideas! This is an area where faculty are learning from other faculty (or from their students!) as much as, if not more than, they are learning from IT people. Help us spread the knowledge!

It's the teaching, stupid.

2012-02-29T15:59:00.005-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education provides plenty of material for me to write about. Most of it is material for me to disagree with.

Take for instance the article with the rhetorically loaded title "A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn't Working". The professor isn't accomplished or successful, he's tech-happy! Practically goofy in the head! He reboots like a broken computer - is he even a person? Maybe he's a robot who's goofy in the head! And what causes this reboot? Someone told him his teaching advice wasn't working! Someone finally broke the news to him! He gave out teaching advice - but that doesn't work either! It's a massive pile-up of broken gadgets we didn't need in the first place! Get the trash can!

I hate these kinds of articles.

As often happens at the Chronicle and elsewhere, though, once all the standard preconceptions have been aired (as if to reassure their audience that they do hold the correct preconceptions), there is actually some small meat to the article. In this case, the meat is that Prof. Wesch has discovered that few of his colleagues have been able to successfully implement his suggestions for enhancing their classes with technology.

No one needs to be threatened by this, because the article is already framed to posit that Prof. Wesch is, at best, a half-crazy piece of technology himself constantly on the edge of a breakdown. No one would make the cognitive leap to suggesting that perhaps the fault lies not in Prof. Wesch, but in the colleagues who grasp the letter but not the spirit of his suggestions.

Fortunately, Michael Wesch himself does actually get quoted in the article (starting in paragraph 5) and he points to the issue immediately: what is missing in his colleagues' implementation of the technology is a sense of purpose.

Over and over again in our Catalyst Boot Camp, we stressed that technology on its own is nothing. Technology can only benefit a class to the extent that it facilitates something you already want to do.

Students don't do their homework? Tough to pace the class for both advanced and less advanced students? Quiet students don't talk? Students not grasping historical or geographical relationships? Concepts needing to be constantly repeated?

These and many more common teaching issues can be addressed with technology. But the issue comes first, not the technology. Technology implemented for no reason isn't just useless, it's time-consuming and probably irritating.

As it turns out in the Chronicle article, Mr. Wesch is juxtaposed with Christopher Sorensen, a teacher with 34 years of experience who is highly successful with the method he uses: lecturing.

(This section of the article, by the way, is titled "Learning from an 'Old Fogy'" - a subtitle that manages to insult Prof. Sorensen as well as the practically insane cyborg previously mentioned, Prof. Wesch.)

Prof. Sorensen spends hours preparing each lecture before every class. He gets psyched up and into a "fifth gear" before he lectures, and not surprisingly, he connects with his students very well. He doesn't expect his students to retain everything from his lectures, but considers his lectures a vital piece of the learning process wherein he's "plowing the ground" for the concepts and processes they will learn more thoroughly, and practice, when they read or do other homework. His primary goal in the lecture is to "convinc[e] students that his material is worth their attention."

It's not too surprising that Michael Wesch would find Christopher Sorensen's teaching method to be effective in its way. It isn't news to anyone in academia that some lecturers are compelling and magnetic, and that they convey the importance of their material as well as the details.

What the Chronicle article fails to address in its poor treatment of both teachers is that no one who has ever advocated using technology in the classroom has ever intended to derail faculty who are already successful at what they're doing. Fantastic lecturers shouldn't be necessarily encouraged to do more interactive things with technology; they're already connected with their students.

But the plain truth is that most of us would love to be either Michael Wesch or Christopher Sorensen. We'd take any road that would get us to where we can reliably, effectively reach our students. That's why we're reading articles about technology in teaching. We're dying to know. Should we be adding PowerPoints to our lectures? Do we need to care about clickers? How do we get students to shut down Facebook for a while and get as excited about what we're teaching as they do about that? Heck, at least we can figure out how to ask those questions! There's more public discussion and more resources available on technical questions than there is on tougher pedagogical issues that plague us. We're experts in our fields who already manage to teach pretty well or we wouldn't be where we are. But we're all still trying to figure out how to be better - just like the faculty at Kansas State University who are trying to figure out how to implement Michael Wesch's advice. (And if some techy tools can get us there, in however-many-we-need implementation steps, we'll do it!)

Those Kansas State faculty are all probably just as interested in any tips Christopher Sorensen has to offer about how to make lectures more engaging too. Because we're all trying to do the same thing: get better at teaching. Which is incredibly difficult, constantly changing, dependent on a universe of variables we can't control, increasingly undervalued, and oh yeah, necessary for the good of our students and our society.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, like most news outlets in the United States, simultaneously holds the preconceived notions that:

Technology is being pushed into our schools.
Technology is the sine qua non of the 21st century.
Technology in education is at heart a silly waste of time and money.
There are great faculty who don't need technology.
Most faculty are already great faculty.

But only #2 and #4 are actually true. Those of us on the faculty know that there's no such thing as faculty who just "are" great faculty. Being a great faculty member means doing a lot of hard work and constantly trying new things, lest you or your class become stale. We are always in a state of becoming.

As in any field, I believe that most faculty are actually working hard to become great faculty. Great faculty connect with their students and convey the importance of learning as well as impart a great deal of factual information or processes for learning.

Students today have grown up in a highly connected world very different from that in which most faculty grew up. There is an extremely deep cultural divide between students and faculty today, much deeper than is usually recognized. Great faculty need to bridge that gap as they do what they do, and it isn't getting any easier.

If there is a reason to use technology - and remember, there should be one, or one shouldn't bother - the reason is that it can actually help bridge the cultural gap between students and faculty. It can be used to convey to the students the immediacy, the importance of the topic being addressed in the class. That message can come across because, as in Michael Wesch's class, the teacher immediately addresses questions that the students raise via communication channels they're comfortable with, like Twitter. It can come across in a religion class when they look at a controversy trending on Twitter about a Hindu goddess printed on bikinis.

It can also come across when students using clickers see an instant graph of their opinions on a complicated topic, or their evaluation of a fellow student's research presentation. It can come across when students get frequent feedback, from weekly quizzes that just check how well they're keeping up with the material, and an email from their professor if they start to fall behind. It can come across when they write a blog topic on a play they're struggling with - and the play's author responds with his current thoughts about the same scene.

Technology can help bring faculty and students closer together. Technology can help convey the material or the importance of the material to students.

It can only help. The work, the idea, the goal has to be the teacher's.

I long for the day when these teeth-gritting articles are quaint artifacts of the past. Can't we all just agree on some new basic principles, that aren't preconceptions at all, but the solid results of 30 years now of using technology in teaching? Can't we learn?

The average college faculty member wants to connect to students and have students learn. The average college student wants to do exactly what they did before (in high school, or in their first years of college) which earned them A's and got them to the point where they are today. The average college student lives his or her life online. The average college student believes that college is not life - that learning is not life - because it doesn't happen online, it happens in lectures they find boring or other similarly non-riveting "class" activities.

The average college professor can help to bridge that gap through strategic, purposeful use of technology in their classes, uses that make the class constantly real and live to students by presenting them with problems to solve, research to do, and opportunities to synthesize what they learn into real essays, real presentations, or real research with real audiences. (If you want some ideas on how to do this, drop me or my staff an email.)

Even some lectures - like Michael Wesch's - can help teachers connect to students with the help of technology, even as some lectures - like Christopher Sorensen's - manage to do the same just fine without it.

Faculty who have already learned how to use technology to connect with their students and accomplish their teaching goals are not "tech-happy". Faculty who are already successful without having to do these things are not "fogeys". Faculty who don't fall into either group, who are still trying to figure out how best do what they want to do - connect with students, get them to learn - with or without technology, should be called "conscientious". That small group of faculty who ignore that they are not yet successful and who ignore that technology might be able to help them should be called ... to task.

And journalists who imply that the world is better now because one of our "tech-happy" cyborg-profs now (finally!) understands that really connecting with students, with community, is the true goal of teaching (because he rebooted!)... well, I don't know what they should be called. I don't know much about journalism. But I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be called "journalists".

Open-access textbooks, e-textbooks, and e-readers

2012-01-05T12:58:00.009-05:00

I know there's a lot of confusion surrounding these hot topics when I hear from a faculty member who asks me "I don't understand what the hype is about - isn't this just like posting readings in Blackboard?"

None of these topics is just like posting readings in Blackboard, but none of these things is really the same as any other of these topics either, so let's see if we can clear some things up.

There is a massive wave of interest in open-access textbooks in this country, driven by student and parent concern about higher education costs, which is driving the interest of both state and federal governments. If you heard an interview at an Occupy movement site this last fall, you heard a college student complaining about how much college debt he or she was in - and probably how disappointing it was that all that debt didn't lead to a job. Governments simply cannot ignore any more the public's complaints about costs in higher education, and textbook costs are often very large and hit students very hard because most families don't know to plan for them.

An open-access textbook is a textbook that is published under a public domain license or, more often, a version of the GNU or Creative Commons license. This means that users - you and I - are able to download, modify, and share the book as we would like - and for free. Teachers can use just chapters 3 through 8, if they want, and write their own chapter 1, and post it on their open class website as well as in a locked Blackboard or Moodle course. This is a huge difference from any other type of textbook, not because it's electronic, but because it's modifiable and shareable.

Florida and California have large movements to create textbooks along these lines, especially for introductory classes for which one textbook can serve many thousands of students. The federal government is also sponsoring a project to foster more good quality open-access textbooks. If you Google "open access resource examples", or "open educational resources", you'll see a number of examples of these projects - "resources" rather than "textbooks" because creating distributable, modifiable videos, simulations, and exercises is just as important to this movement as textbooks. (Check out OERCommons to find resources in your field.)

Most open-access resources are distributed electronically. Electronic distribution makes distribution very low cost and easy. That often confuses both faculty and students, though, because there are a ton of electronic textbooks that are for-profit, restricted-copyright texts just like the textbooks they pay for in the bookstore. A recent study demonstrated that electronic textbooks don't save students any money, and the reason for that is simple: because they are provided by the usual publishers and usually priced in the same way as the usual print textbooks. Those publishers have their own reasons for those pricing models but they aren't changing them just because the e-textbooks are distributed electronically.

There's no denying, though, that electronic textbooks are a fast growing category, because electronic books in general are a fast growing category. It's been many months since Amazon reported that their sales of e-books surpassed their sales of print books - and in Internet-time, six months is like four dog-years. One of the most popular gifts for the Christmas and Hannukah just passed was an e-book reader. Kindles, Nooks, and various tablets and other e-readers all did very well (though yes, Kindles outsold the rest). We've tested the new Kindles in Faculty Computing Services and the Kindle Fire is a nice alternative to an iPad for those who want a smaller device and don't mind that it runs an Android operating system rather than Apple's iOS (translation: it isn't quite as cool and fun to use). E-books can also be read on smartphones, which now have large, good screens. 2011 seems to have been the tipping point many were waiting for for a long time: e-books are now perfectly normal. Lots of students still don't want them - but lots of students do.

In such an environment, it's only reasonable that students sometimes want e-book alternatives to their textbooks. But there are two very different options for our selection: e-books from publishers, whose only difference from the standard books is that they are electronic, and e-books that are open-access, that are freely distributable and modifiable.

For the student, the cost differential is considerable. For the instructor, the options are very different as well: the OER textbook offers an opportunity to modify existing textbooks or related resources and copy or distribute them however they please.

(Some of the open-access educational textbooks are provided with a print-on-demand option, confusing things further. For a small charge, the provider will print an inexpensive copy and send it to the student. The cost is often 1/10th of the cost of a commercial textbook. The student in these cases has the choice of paying for the print version, or just downloading the electronic version for free. Again, the primary difference is the license structure of the textbook. OER textbooks are distributable and modifiable. Regular commercial textbooks must be purchased from the publisher and cannot be copied or changed, and all standard copyright restrictions apply to making copies for your class.)

There's another reason faculty should be aware of the open-access textbook movement. Those faculty who create such texts have a chance to be very influential in their fields. Without the constraints of publishers or paper distribution, one textbook could easily be adopted for an entire state, or the nation. Moreover, because it is electronically distributed, updates and corrections can be redistributed without any real additional cost.

Many of our faculty do create textbooks, and this is an opportunity for them to affect their field in a very big way. For those programs with defined goals and agreed-upon approaches to their goals, even a group of faculty could quickly collaborate to create influential textbooks in their field. I think we will be seeing more and more of these developments in the next one to two years - very quickly for the academic environment, but kind of slowly for the consumer electronics world. Open-access textbooks, more than e-textbooks in general, are where the two worlds really come together.

Does that clarify? Confuse? Please do comment and let me know!

Moving universities forward

2011-10-11T11:51:00.002-04:00

Compared to London's Underground or Paris' Metro, the New York subway seems to be a mess. It's full, it's filthy, and occasionally it catches on fire.

There's a reason for this, I've been told: the European systems were largely rebuilt after World War II, thus leapfrogging New York's system which is just as old or older but has had significantly less reinvestment and reinvention.

I don't know if that's true but I keep it in mind when I look at our use of technology resources at universities. Universities in the 80s spent a lot of money putting in network infrastructure (eventually internet) that far surpassed what was available in the rest of the country, let alone the world, and they bought a lot of computers to connect to that network, too.

Now most of our students at Hofstra are coming to school with multiple computers plus, often, a game system, ereader, or smartphone, and they wonder why the network connection they have at school is slower than the one they had at home.

Some of that is simple technical information that they don't have. We purposefully slow down, for instance, traffic that we have good reason to suspect is illegal. And the internet is increasingly clogged with crud no matter where they are. We passed the point in 2009 when 90% of what traveled through the internet was spam.

But that technical information illustrates an underlying truth. What was cutting edge is now omnipresent, and necessarily, the first parts of that infrastructure that were built are kind of dirty, are really full, and occasionally catch fire.

There are huge pieces of that infrastructure that we cannot do without or else we fall off the earth. We need our large-traffic connections to the internet, and we need as much wireless access to that connection as we can get. If we want to use services that exist off campus, like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, those are the roads we need to get there. Five years ago the holy trinity was podcasting, wikis, and blogs, but we still needed our network connections to get to those places more than anything else. Before that it was Blackboard - same story, as our Blackboard at Hofstra is actually hosted in Virginia.

I find that faculty worry far more about the endpoints - the devices they will use to get on the network - than about the network themselves, whereas students are the other way round. Students live in a world that faculty are just dipping their toe in; pay attention to the different priorities. I may have a jaundiced view of things since what I mostly get to hear are complaints, but faculty are the ones who complain about how many devices they get from the University (one computer) whereas students are the ones who complain about where the wireless signal appears slow.

We still don't have a laptop requirement for students at Hofstra, so we still aren't providing for the last 1-2% of our students who truly cannot afford a computer of their own. But for 98% of our students, owning devices is really not the challenge. For whatever reason, they or their parents have chosen to invest in the devices that do what they want to do; they want us, their network provider, to make sure they can do it.

Many faculty, for whatever reason, don't own the proliferation of devices that students do. Presumably faculty live rich, full lives without a laptop, a netbook, an iPad and an iPhone. To be honest, I can't really imagine such a life, but I certainly sympathize with the lifestyle. I've been camping.

If you are such a faculty member, though, let me encourage you to sympathize with the lifestyle students are living. You may feel that they're always on, distracted, insubordinate and insufficiently deep thinkers. Oh, I know, you would never use the word insubordinate, but isn't that what you're really thinking when you insist that your students take their electronic devices all out of their pockets and bags and place them face down on the front of the desk so that you can ensure they're not using them? If you haven't done that lately, I assure you your colleagues have. And those students often think faculty are disconnected, uselessly abstract, and power-mad. No, they'd never use the descriptor power-mad - they're not crazy and they want their good grades - but they think it just the same.

We can ignore this gap in lifestyle, in living approaches. After, all the classroom is an unequal power structure and it is up to the faculty member to conduct their class as they see fit. I don't question any faculty member's right to dictate the terms of class participation, and I'm a huge fan of the sentence "Let's close the laptops; I need you to listen to me right now."

But it's worth noting that we can also address the gap. It truly is a difference in how to approach one's life. A student who is always on with a plethora of electronic devices could be at the center of a peer learning network gathering academic research tidbits as easily as they are at the center of a social network gathering data about who's dating whom. That won't happen automatically, though, and it won't happen without our intervention. If we personally don't live and research that way, it won't happen for the students.

Research indicates that we do live and research that way. A study this spring indicated that 90% of faculty are using social media for research or work. So increasingly we the faculty are also online. What are the challenges that we're really facing?

Is it that actually only a small handful of colleagues are the kind who make the students take all electronic devices out of their pockets and place them facedown on the desk?

Is it that we fear what our colleagues will think if we introduce social media into our classroom (after all, they're playing Farmville too, they know it isn't all work)?

Is it that we don't know how to bridge the gap between the way we research and what we teach?

I think it's all three but the last is the biggest challenge. If we've been teaching for a while - and I've been teaching off and on for about eighteen years - we have methodologies we were taught, or that we've developed over time, and it's an enormous amount of effort to change them.

I also find that a lot of faculty still think of the classroom as the place where students receive knowledge from the faculty member, rather than the place where students learn how to research and develop their own knowledge. (And if you follow that link: isn't it interesting to think about asking students to apply for a course, asking them what they bring to the course and what they get out of it? I know some upper level courses do this often. What if more of our courses did that? What's the difference between challenging the student and accepting them?)

This blog is supposed to be where I convey the thoughts I shared in our past Boot Camps (even if we don't get to discuss them, which is the best part). So here's a thought I often share: If you think you're teaching facts, forget it. There's little that's factual that your students can't look up. If there's a concept they really need to understand that you're sick of spending time conveying, let us help you make a learning object to address it - a video, an animation, an exercise. But don't spend too much class time on it. Students will get it or they won't, and if you have a learning object you can direct the students to it as often as you like and ask them to come to office hours if they really didn't get it (they will - give them a quiz on the concept, they'll sort themselves out fast enough). But finding out facts is now the job of Google, and no matter how you feel about Google there's not much point in trying to turn that educational clock back.

What your students don't know is how to evaluate what they see. They don't even know when "factual" is a reasonably contestable word. They don't know what's good information - or good research - and what isn't. That's the big difference between your use of social media and theirs, and we don't model our use of it enough for our students. We don't model for them how we pick the article we pick out of Google Scholar - we don't often even tell them about Google Scholar. We don't want them in our social networks but we don't explain how we use them and why we shut out undergraduates, either. And most importantly we don't direct them in how to form their own learning communities. We insist firmly that unauthorized collaboration is cheating, but we don't often direct good, productive collaboration - and we almost never model it. I know you've worked with a colleague on your last research paper, presentation, or book - at the very least you discussed it over lunch or after a meeting and that colleague probably helped you a ton even in a ten minute discussion. We don't show our students how that works.

So a productive bridge might be our own research, how we conduct it, how we write, how we collaborate, and then developing activities for our students that mirror some of that.

We might have to lower academic standards temporarily to bridge between their world and ours. We can have them conduct mini-ethnographies by interviewing people on Twitter or Facebook - and then we get to discuss the differences between that and real fieldwork. We might have to accept that Wikipedia is their starting place for a lot of research - and then explain why, and when, they need to bump up to academic articles. We might have to accept that a blog is informal writing, essentially a draft - and have them do it to get them to write that much more, to an audience, before they write any more "final" paper for us. We don't have to compromise what we think finished academic work is. But we may want to modify what the intermediate steps could look like.

Faculty sometimes think students will figure this out on their own, how to do these things. Most students won't. They order food online and are very plugged in, but we know two things about traditional college-age students: they have no idea how any of that technology works, and they have no idea how to use any of it for academic purposes.

Faculty who do should guide those students.

And if you aren't one of the faculty who's ready to try building a bridge (I recommend a small one, with plenty of failsafe supports), then that's where you need to focus your energy first: trying some of these tools for yourself. I'm right there with you in anti-capitalized revulsion for what multinational corporations have become. Still, you need to get a smartphone. Learn to text, try a new social media tool for yourself, get it under control, and find something you like. Because if you like it, if you really use it, you can model how to use it for your students in a productive, positive way. Or use the computer Hofstra provides for you, if you're lucky enough to be a full-time faculty member, to investigate those tools for yourself. Faculty Computing is always willing to help you try these things. If you intend to teach for more than a couple of years more, you really need to start at least investigating, as an observer, perhaps, the world the students are living in.

Technology tools come and go but the cycle of change in technology in a university is actually a lot slower; nonetheless, the era of more, more, more computers is over, for a lot of reasons over which the institution has no control. Almost all the students have a ton of computing devices and want the freedom to choose what they want to choose; many of the faculty have followed suit. We certainly need to reinvest in New York's subway system but it's not that clear any more that Hofstra needs to reinvest in more, more, more computers at the endpoints. Nationally the trend is toward facilitating use of computers as easily and securely as possible; this is true in private industry as well as in higher education. Try googling "byoc bring your own computer". It's not clear how much longer any large organization will need to keep purchasing such end-point devices. Ask yourself how many computers you use in a day and how many computers each of your students uses in a day. Very few computer users use only university-provided computers any more. Our focus needs to be on keeping the roads clear, keeping the connections open as best we can, and helping everyone, faculty and student, use all this infrastructure for a teaching and learning purpose. Turns out the internet is more like a highway system than a subway; I'll drive my Prius, you can drive your Suburban, and someone else will be smart enough to get a Zipcar, but if the road itself is full of potholes and blocked by downed trees, no one's going anywhere.

Our educational challenge, guiding our students to make intellectual use of the resource, is more like teaching them to read a map than memorizing place names. What can we teach that are skills they'll use throughout the rest of their lives to learn no matter what the tool du jour is?

Social Networking and classes

2011-08-24T12:00:00.009-04:00

It's no longer possible to ignore the potential of integrating social networking with your teaching. Students actually prefer to have academic systems separate from their Facebook accounts, so when something happens like Missouri forbidding its K-12 teachers from having any contact with their students via Facebook, I don't panic too much. Yes, it sets the cause of modernizing teaching back many years, but it also helps steer clear of any confusion that can result from mixing the teacher's and the student's social networks with classroom discussion and activities.

As I've said many times, most of our students come to our institution with mixed goals. On the one hand they've been successful high school students and they want to keep doing in college what they know they were good at in high school: listening in class, taking notes, doing homework, and taking tests. On the other hand, they themselves live in social networks; I won't bother to point you to an article about this because you'd have to have been living under a rock for the last five years to miss how the under-20 set uses texting, Facebook, and other sites like Twitter as their primary means of communicating with their friends. And Hofstra faculty don't live under rocks. So I don't need to beat that drum.

So our students come to college knowing that the life they like to live happens in social media; but also that success in school comes from doing what they did in high school. This leads to the mixed messages faculty get in college classrooms: some students would love to have part of class in Facebook, some students just want to sit in the back of the class with their mouths shut for the entire semester, and you'll find every level of enthusiasm for interaction in between these two extremes as well.

This year, however, I'd say that colleges have to step it up a notch: increasingly, students are coming to us from high schools where they've had all the usual tools of modern instruction, and frankly, they've had better experiences with it than they're about to have in college. K-12 environments, if they have things like BlackBoard or SmartBoards in their classrooms, often mandate their use more consistently, and train their teachers more consistently to use those tools, than most universities can do. At a university each faculty member usually makes his or her own decisions about how to teach (for-profits excepted), and this is a benefit of the U.S. higher education system: students will be exposed to a lot of different teaching styles during their college degree. Unfortunately, to students it sometimes looks disorganized, old-fashioned, out of touch, or simply thoughtless. Most students like it when the faculty know their names; they also like it when faculty are thoughtful in their use of technology, at the very minimum using it to announce class changes in a timely and consistent way, post documents, gather assignments, and just generally keep the class running in an organized fashion.

So then how do we step it up a notch and integrate social networking in a responsible way? The pluses for it are not that new: when done right, what you want is for your students to be thinking about your class everywhere, all the time. How much would you give for your students to see the everyday pertinence of your class everywhere, all the time? Isn't this a major goal for every faculty member? In my career I've wanted students to see the everyday applicability of clear sentences and paragraphs, or understanding cultures different from that of the United States, or being able to find a responsible academic source supporting a point. I can't imagine a field we're teaching in which we don't want students to see our subject matter everywhere they look: from the calculus student who realizes that she needs calculus to find out how much water her town will need to buy to fill their swimming pool this summer, to the art student who recognizes chiaroscuro in the latest fashion ad - and realizes he could make something just as good.

I'd apply all my same rules for any class activity having to do with social networking - students need to get credit for doing it, even if it's credit/no credit; it needs to be a regular, repeated part of the class, not just a one-off for a week that they can ignore; and it should contribute to your specific goals for the class.

I'm in the same boat as all of you. I need to do SOMEthing for this year, and I have a smallish seminar to teach. So what tool to choose - and how to design an activity? There are blogs and wikis in Blackboard, and a discussion board, but as those of you who've used them know, they're a far cry from true social networking, with its democratization of discussion, ability to connect to phones (our students' equivalents of laptops), and ability to share all kinds of media and comment - all very easily.

Some of our faculty are very excited about Google+, and on the face of it, it's an excellent answer. It's just like Facebook but not Facebook, and all our faculty and students now have access to Google Apps through our portal.

The challenge with Google+ at Hofstra right now is that it isn't actually included in the base set of apps Google provides for us. You can have your students manually create Google+ accounts with their Hofstra Pride gmail addresses, though, and then manually create a circle just for them. Remember Google+ is still a beta, which is computerese for "you get what you get". Google will undoubtedly be uncovering bugs and fixing things for years to come, in that Google way. But it is a very nice option.

If you use it, be sure to log in during class for a few minutes and show students how to create a class circle and share just to that circle. Students shouldn't be posting class work to the world unless they're aware they're doing so, and while I find circles very intuitive and sensible, not every student will do so. On the plus side, at least if they're doing it in Google+ with you instead of Facebook, they're much less likely to accidentally spam all their high school friends and family with their homework assignment!

Twitter is still a great tool for these things as well. I like choosing hours of the day when students' tweets can get texted to my phone (no texts after 10 p.m.!) and how easy Twitter is. My problem there is that I follow a lot of OTHER people on Twitter as well, and some of them follow me. I may well annoy some regular Twitter friends if I start tweeting about global media any hour of the day or night; I have to make a decision about whether or not to mix my class in with my professional and personal contacts there, OR set up a separate Twitter account just for class activity to share with my students. Just like Google+, students would also have to send me their Twitter accounts - either their regular ones, or ones they set up just for my class. If I expect students to be reading each other's tweets as text messages, I should provide an option(like checking the Twitter feed once a day) for those students who, rightfully, don't want their phones beeping at them all day with class observations. (We should be so lucky!)

If you use Twitter, I recommend you agree on a Twitter tag with your students - and check first to make sure it's unique, as #sociologyclass may happen more often on Twitter than you think! Let them know only posts labeled with the appropriate tag for your class will be counted for credit. You can't be chasing all their tweets all over the place, and with a hashtag, you can set up a page that just shows that feed and follow it very regularly.

I like Ning for class interactions a lot. It looks and behaves much like Facebook, and you can try it for 30 days for free or buy a simple $3/mo account to set up a class for yourself. It's super-easy to customize and lets students share pictures or videos in ways they're used to. Because it's private, log-in accounts only, students aren't doing their classwork in "public". You set up your site - yourclass.ning.com - and only the accounts you create or allow can log into that site at all. It's a great way to have students interact with each other as well as with you, which should always be a goal. It would be a great tool for having students share, for instance, pictures of things they saw during the day that relate to the class topic, or news items, or videos from YouTube. The only downside to Ning is that you have to ask students to check it periodically (preferably every day) in addition to checking Blackboard. But this would likely be true of Google+ as well. And like all the rest of these tools, because it's a consumer tool, not a University-provided tool, you need to add and remove your students yourself from the group.

I recommend avoiding Facebook for reasons we already stated, but we do have Inigral's tool Hofstra on Facebook, which allows students to socialize in an app that's connected to Facebook but not Facebook. If you've heard about this product from your students, I would still recommend steering clear of it for teaching because it is intended for students' social purposes, not for teaching; any teaching taking place in it would be "public", meaning all Hofstra participants in the app could see it; and faculty accounts are not provisioned by default to the system. We are running this application on a trial basis; I would not want to steer a teacher towards it.

So none of the choices are perfect, but there are several choices. Of Google+, Ning, and Twitter, what suits your goal best? Twitter restricts the length of the posts pretty severely; on the other hand, a lot of social activity happens there now (news of yesterday's earthquake traveled on Twitter before any major news outlet was carrying it - people read their friends' tweets about the earthquake in Virginia, and then felt it themselves a few minutes later in Ohio or New York!). Fascinating political and social commentary is constantly being posted there as well, making it great for any social science, media, business, teaching, or communication topic. Google+ and Ning both give you great non-Facebook, Facebook-like social networks, with all the media sharing possible - great for humanities classes, writing, art, television production, and similar.

Faculty Computing Services is familiar with all these products, but to varying degrees of familiarity. If you'd like our help getting started feel free to give us a call (all our contact information is at http://hofstra.edu/fcs as always). We also have some tips and ideas for getting started at http://hofstrateach.org - I usually look something up there myself to answer my question first. But these are consumer-level products, not enterprise-level products, so to a certain extent, if you decide to use them, you're taking a leap into social networking as an individual with your particular students. It's the wave of the future, but it might feel a little deep. If you decide to take the plunge, just keep swimming!

As with any electronic tool, I'd recommend that you structure use of the tool for your class:

1. Ask students to visit or read at least once a day. Spell out in your syllabus that this is a requirement for the class and students will not pass your class without participating in this activity no matter what fraction of their final grade is made up of this type of participation.

2. Require students to contribute at least once a week. (This can be based on class reading - what questions came up for you when you did the reading? - or based on outside-of-class activities - post an example of modernist architecture you saw in your neighborhood, or a book you found in the library on this topic, or an interview you did with a friend or family member on this question.)

3. Give credit - even just a 1 instead of a 0 in the Blackboard gradebook is sufficient. Give credit every week so students can see how they're progressing.

4. Bring that class interaction back to class. I recommend participating yourself on the same guidelines, but even if you don't, when you meet with your students, if you bring back the discussion ("As we saw from Brian's interview on Ning this week"... "This photo Sheila posted demonstrates exactly what we've been talking about"...) you make your class alive, current, and happening all the time.

5. Base a test question or paper writing opportunity or capstone presentation option or any other sort of assessed exercise on material that's been shared or insights the class has reached together via their social networking discussions. If you just use the same questions you used last year, you disconnect. If you draw on the discussion your students have been having, via social networking as well as in class, you bring it all together and involve the students in the class more than you can imagine. The smallest link helps a lot. DO NOT make it an "optional" question. If you're using social networking, you're using it, and it's a required part of the class - "optional" isn't an option.

There may always be a student or two who still drops out of online discussion, just as there can be such a student who drops out class, but you need to focus your discussion on the students who are participating, enjoying, and learning. Do let such students know as soon as possible that they will not be able to pass the class until they connect.

Every once in a while there is a student who is still uncomfortable with technology, sufficiently to inhibit them in participating in such a class exercise. This fall, for the first time, you can send such students to Learning Support, a new division of Student Computing Services based out of the Learning Lab in Calkins 106. Trained student support personnel will help them. You can learn more about Learning Support at http://hofstra.edu/learningsupport - our new website will be populated by September 1!

It really would be different.

2011-06-10T13:00:00.003-04:00

Trent Batson is a colleague who is always several steps ahead of me and I love his Campus Technology article, "10 Rules of Teaching in this Century". If we really read and understood and debated all the suggestions of this article, we would know pretty much everything we need to know about teaching with technology today.

It's a short, sweet piece, and I wonder if everyone who reads it really understands the revolutionary suggestions he is making. Right off the bat in his suggestion #1, Trent advocates "Don't just tell students the key knowledge in your field, but help them discover it through problem-based active learning." This is something lots of us feel that we do, but we're actually a skewed angle away from the reality of what Trent's suggesting.

The idea with problem-based learning is to actually replace all the class time normally spent on lectures with problem-solving activities. This is a hard one for many faculty to grasp. I have talked to faculty who say that they really must explain the material in class, otherwise the student won't really understand it the way they have to for future lessons/problems. Often the same faculty also say that students don't really apply what they've "learned" - which is really what they've heard - to the later activities in the class.

These are related problems. We must at least seriously consider giving up the model of education where we tell the student something, they absorb and remember it, and then later on they apply it. There's strong evidence that this model never really worked that well. There's much stronger evidence that in fact the learning that stays with the student is the learning they do on their own. When I ask faculty when they really "got" a key concept in their field, it was usually when they were doing the work - conducting an experiment, synthesizing research and writing up their ideas or findings, creating a piece of art for themselves, talking to a live interview subject or creating a map for themselves - it was when they were doing the work that is the work of their field. Sometimes that "aha moment" occurs early on in their educational careers, and such "aha moments" are why we value higher education where students have access to great professors, great learning facilities, small classes, field trips, and other experiences where those moments tend to happen. Sometimes, sadly, that "aha moment" doesn't even happen until graduate school, at some point where they were doing the work of their field for the first time and really caught the excitement of it because they saw that there were real questions to answer and how to tackle answering them.

It's not actually idealist to try to move that "aha moment" back all the way to the first year of college. We must give up any idea we ever had, if we had it, that first year students arrive on our campuses as blank slates ready to be filled with higher knowledge. In fact they've already had long educational careers, for better or worse, and we can ask them to build on those careers immediately by putting them to work doing the work that is the bread and butter of the field. It actually is not untoward to give them a reading assignment and then ask them to do some academic work based on what they read rather than have us explicate it for them.

No student is immediately going to intuit how to develop a thesis statement, how to evaluate a definite integral, how to titrate an acid/base solution, or how to conjugate adjectives in Japanese. But great explanations of these tasks can actually be pretty brief, and we can often re-use great multimedia materials made by others for these basics. Instead of devoting 80-90% of the semester to explanation and 10% to problem-solving, we can flip it. Spend 10% on explanation (again, using technology to help where we can) and 90% on problem-solving. Let the students get stuck, let the students fail, and then unstick them, show them how to improve. As students they really don't get why or how to improve until they've failed, and we need to give them a lot more time to do that.

Imagine a class where instead of "covering" the material for a semester and then giving the student a final paper or exam to see if they "got it", students created work - research, experiments, writing, bibliographies, presentations, movies, lessons, summaries - from the very first day. Imagine that our job as faculty was to help direct them in doing the work - "Here's how to find the resource you need; here's how to complete that task" - in a manageable way (video or audio or text once for all, not one-on-one assistance for one at a time). Imagine that they turned in the work - and it wasn't very good! And we said so! And then they did it again! And again! Imagine that by the third or fourth go-round, students were really starting to understand what it was that one did when one does math, or science, or literature, or art, or management, or film, or teaching, or any of the things we teach our students to do.

Imagine how much more they would understand the material, and how much of it they would own and take with them from the class, if we taught the class that way.

That's really the type of model Trent is suggesting, and I think he's right. We all know that you never understand anything so well as when you explain it to someone else (in your writing, your presentation, your portfolio, your anything), but previously it wasn't practical, we thought, to do something like that with every student in a class.

But that's exactly the type of thing technology really can help with. If I have 30 students in a class and I'm determined to teach this way, technology lets me share all sorts of resources with them beyond the book. Technology lets them collaborate and raise questions before class so you can answer them in class. Technology lets you do frequent low-stakes quizzes or papers so that they can just get credit for completing them and you can see who's not keeping up, with very little time and effort during the semester. Technology makes it trivial for you to record a ten-minute explanation of "Here's where most of you are going astray" as a video on a Thursday, distribute it to all your students, and have them back in class on the Monday with the next set of questions based on what you've just explained and then what they tried/thought/did.

When done well, it doesn't look like a traditional class and some faculty don't feel like they're doing their job if they don't "cover" the material - by which they mean lecture, however much the lecture might be "enhanced" with multimedia materials. But I guarantee that the students who leave such a class, even if less material has been "covered", understand more of what has been addressed during the course of the class and are more likely to retain it. When they've applied it over and over and over and over again in your class, they sure as heck are going to be (at least more likely to be) able to apply it again the following semester.

To tackle it one more way: Our current model presupposes that we tell the student everything they need to know (yes, in addition to other activities, but really the bulk of class time is spent with us telling them what they need to know), and then at the end of the semester that they prove that they know it by doing something - maybe a final exam (though the same could be true of papers, presentations, or any other type of "capstone" assessment). Faculty often cringe at the idea of students just doing the thing first they were supposed to do last, and doing it badly. Why? What could possibly demonstrate better to students that they don't know what they came to class to master? I know some creative faculty who give the final on the first day of class. One may reasonably expect everyone to fail. What if the teacher then gave the student direction on how to derive, research, create, find one or more of the answers, and then gave a similar test again? What if they took a "final" five times through the semester, each time figuring out more of how to do the work that a "final" represents?

What grade do you think they would get the last time they took that test?

And if you were the student, which type of work would you rather do?

Education and digital citizenship

2011-06-02T15:45:00.002-04:00

For the last few Boot Camps I've made a passing mention of "digital citizenship" just to ask the question of whether or not we are addressing it sufficiently in higher education. The example I always use is to ask the question of whether or not our students are prepared to vote on questions having to do with electronic voting machines. It's a question as pertinent to the operation of democracy in our country as any in these times, and yet I can't seem to sell it as a pressing educational topic.

Yesterday I was surprised to hear an entire issue of the news program "On Point" address questions of cyberattacks and possible military responses. A little Googling and I found out at least one of the reasons why this topic bubbled to a head yesterday: Lockheed Martin suffered from a cyber-attack, and obviously that is a defense contractor of the first order. While several outlets are reporting that the attackers came up empty, others are also reporting that nonetheless the U.S. is quickly moving to consider cyber-attacks "acts of war" and deciding how and when to respond and in what fashion.

There is no clearer example of what it means to be a citizen of a 21st century nation.

And on NPR, where the story I first heard is available as a podcast, the very first of the 46 comments says "How can anyone listen to this program and have any trust in our elections where the vote counting is done in secret on electronic voting machines?"

There are a number of topics that comprise "Digital Citizenship" and hopefully some of them, at least, are going to be addressed in K-12 educational environments going forward. But are we sure we're graduating students who are at least aware these topics exist? And if we're not, how can we possibly integrate these issues into a curriculum that's already overloaded in our limited time with our students?

Some of you know what I'm going to say: we are going to have to give up something to get something else. It may very well be that we need to cut one lesson or unit from our syllabus to tackle digital citizenship questions somewhere in that same syllabus. But I suspect that we're already teaching a lot of topics that touch on these issues. It's not hard (using this particular topic list) to imagine the writing class that at least mentions digital literacy, the political science class that touches on digital rights and responsibilities or digital access (Arab Spring, anyone?), the legal studies class that addresses digital etiquette, or the economics or business class that includes digital communication as well as digital commerce. It may also be that we just need to consciously highlight those places in our curriculum where we're discussing what are for our faculty often very new topics, and make it clear that there are many open questions to be addressed.

And while I never advocate doing an exercise using electronic tools only once, it may be that doing one exercise in the course of the class on a digital citizenship topic is enough. Somewhere in our various curricula we do need to at least address these various topics.

The speed of change and mobile computing

2011-04-25T16:25:00.003-04:00

At the first Boot Camp in 2006, recipients received laptops (presaging the laptops we were able to offer to all full-time faculty members beginning in 2007). I don't want to tell any stories out of school, because what happens in Boot Camp stays in Boot Camp, but it's fair to say that mobile computing was new for those first few Boot Campers - and actually for several groups of Boot Campers after that.

It's hard to believe how laptops have come to replace desktops in only five short years, even harder to believe for those of us who remember when there were no desktops at all.

But it's almost impossible to believe the speed with which "mobile computing" is coming to replace laptops.

I have to put "mobile computing" in quotation marks because it's an often-used phrase that still lacks general consensus on its meaning. Mobile phones that can compute are clearly indicated in there somewhere. "Smartphones" like the iPhones and Blackberries are not just phones, they're handheld devices running their own computing operating systems and therefore their own applications - harking back to the days of Palm devices, but far more omnipresent. Building for smartphones gives tech people a headache, because you can seldom build just once: if you really want to write an application that can do things, you need to write it for iPhone and Blackberry (and probably Droid, and perhaps if you really want to get ambitious, the Windows smartphone OS as well). And that means, yes, you're writing it two or three or four times.

But what really blows the mind of anyone who wants to understand "mobile computing" is the proliferation of devices that aren't phones and aren't laptops either and yet on which one expects to be able to compute. ("Compute" in this sense is almost never in the classic sense of "compute" - to have an electronic device execute your calculations for you - but in the modern sense of "compute", which generally seems to mean "access the web, SMS, and related technologies, and do things with them".)

I have sitting on my desk right now an iPad and a Dell Duo, a netbook that converts into a tablet. More than netbooks themselves (I own two, one running Windows 7 and one running Ubuntu, an open-source Linux adaptation specifically for netbooks), these devices change the paradigm of computing. The screens are bigger than phone screens, and the interface allows for a certain amount of touch control and input as well as keyboard (or "keyboard", in the case of the iPad with its virtual keyboard).

We acquired the Dell for testing, as we are looking at ways of using tablets for interactive online class meetings, and to display to the screen (instead of Sympodiums, for instance) in classrooms. We don't expect any of these technologies to become widespread any time soon - but the pace of change may surprise even us, the academic technology nerds whose job is to look into these things.

What shocks me most about the Dell Duo is that it is clearly competition for the iPad. While I applaud Apple's genius with consumer electronics, there are still a lot of Windows users who want to be able to use a tablet with Windows - and I think this convertible netbook may end up being a nicer option for them. It's a 10" netbook, with a flippable touch screen. It weighs only slightly more than this iPad here, and it has onboard USB and headphone jacks, doing the iPad one better. (Don't consider this a sales advertisement - go look into one on your own if you want to buy one. For one thing, I've logged into mine and still don't quite see how to interact with it via touch.)

My point is not that this is a cool thing (we here at Faculty and Student Computing are not ones for the toys, you know - even our per-capita membership in World of Warcraft is very low) but that this is a consumer device that runs Windows and could sincerely give the iPad a run for its money. For that matter, the iPad has a lot of money. Googling "iPads sold to date" gives me an answer of 19 million to date (as of 5 days ago). Given that the first iPads were sold almost exactly one year ago (the first week of April, and this is now the last), that is an insane number of devices circulating - and changing people's attitude toward computing.

That's why the phrase "mobile computing" sent people by the hundreds, if not thousands, to participate in EDUCAUSE's "Mobile Computing: A 5-Day Sprint". We computing people are rushing to keep up with this trend. We have the same things to worry about with these new mobile devices as we did with laptops: the costs of upkeep, the need to integrate them into our current information environment, and above all the security of our students' data.

But for faculty and students, the opportunities, I think, outweigh the challenges. I've seldom seen people as charged up about a device as some of our faculty are charged up about the iPad, and the students are right behind them. In fact, I think I only saw it once: when students and teachers started getting desktop computers of their own, in the late 80s and early 90s.

Those people were on fire with enthusiasm for the power and opportunity inside those ugly plastic boxes. They could create simulation after simulation with spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 - they need never again run numbers over and over on chalkboards! They could correspond in minutes with colleagues in Europe or South America! They could connect to online library catalogs and browse whole collections without leaving their desks! The whole process of revision in writing was completely reinvented - revising could become an ongoing, fluid process, no re-typing of existing text required! Those people were excited.

Today's faculty and students are excited in different, but related ways. They have many computers - almost too many, some of them. This device goes with them anywhere, lightly and easily, even for some folks with physical challenges - and with DropBox, it can connect them to their files anytime, anywhere! It lets them physically interact with the writing surface in ways they haven't been able to since they went digital in 1990 - they can scrawl notes on the screen - and then email them to other people instantly! They can read email, by the way, anywhere and any time - but on a screen large enough to also host a fair-sized book page! And color graphics! And (almost, in my opinion) small enough to hold up and read with one hand! They can watch full-length movies on that same screen!

When I look at that list, none of those things seems as revolutionary to me as the earlier list. After all, I could do those things with netbooks, or notebooks, or my beloved Palm device, or I don't want to do them at all. But for the people who do want to do them, it's as though they've been straining upwards for years and now their wings have been freed.

I didn't want to run spreadsheets with Lotus 1-2-3 either - but then, I never had to write them out on chalkboards (and do the cascading calculations across all those chalkboards that people used to have to do when they taught or learned heavy calculation & projection topics). Since it has become possible, a lot more people use spreadsheets. What tools that are special-purpose now will become omnipresent in the future simply because they're now easy enough to use for everyone?

I consider myself a digital native even more than a nerd. I don't like playing with technology devices for their own sake - though given a task I do want to do, I get excited when a computing device makes it possible to do it. In this way I'm not that unlike our faculty and students who are diving into mobile computing with such gusto.

The challenge for IT people with mobile computing is how to support an exploding IT environment when we were used to a curve with a steady gradient for many years. We thought we understood what "computing" was. Now we have to sprint to keep up.

But the challenge for teachers and learners is to cope with an even broader yawning chasm between the people who live digitally, and the people who don't.

Recently during a "Hofstra at 75" panel, I was surprised to hear faculty discussing whether or not there was a bigger generational gap between students and faculty now than had ever existed before. These were faculty who came here to teach more than forty or even fifty years ago, faculty who had lived through student protests and shutdowns of the main administrative building (even faculty who had studied in the Quonset hut that had previously been in the same place as that administrative building). And here they were discussing whether or not there is a bigger gap between the way they think and learn and the way today's students think and learn than any gap they had ever seen before.

I was even more surprised when one faculty member disagreed by pointing out that she had been using technology tools for twenty years - and they were simple, and easy, and had great benefits, so why weren't other people using them?

There was, of course, no faculty consensus on whether or not students do fundamentally think differently these days, or whether or not it would be easy or desirable to use technology tools in our classes. The conversation, ultimately, wasn't about that.

But I do know, and I think most of those faculty would agree, that certain types of information knowledge and creation, which used to be centrally important to education, are now rendered obsolete by communications and computing technology - as obsolete as writing out all those spreadsheets on chalkboards all over the room. And I'm not sure that anything cohesive or coherent has replaced them. Some of my colleagues on the faculty are carrying out very promising experiments to address this gap, and we saw several of them at our second annual Teaching with Technology Day on April 12 (more on that later). But in the meantime, I'm paying very close attention to mobile computing, and trying to figure out what it means for teaching and learning.

I think it means that, now more than ever, learning has to equal more than information retrieval or regurgitation. Synthesizing or evaluating answers is far more important than ever. I think it means that students who are used to finding out answers in the .12 seconds it takes to execute a Google search really need to know how to ask good questions.

And maybe even more importantly, they need to have a context for deciding what a question is, and what an answer is, and when they think they've found one, or decided on one. And they need help evaluating the universe of possible answers - not just to find the one that is right, but to live with the myriad of possible answers that may exist.

I don't know why "mobile computing" is now and not five years ago. Maybe it's the price point of smartphones. Maybe it's the size and speed of the tools. (A lot of people, when asked what they like about an iPad, mention how quick it is to turn "on" and access versus a laptop.) Maybe it's the combination of the tools with cloud computing services that keep your files available to you anytime anywhere, and the ubiquity of phone chips (even in devices like Kindles) allowing access to those files anytime and anywhere. Maybe it's the cameras and microphones that finally turn all these devices, not just into consumption tools, but into production tools and even into "communicators" that far exceeded even what Star Trek promised us. (Sure, they had videophones on desktops - but the away teams didn't have video connection back to the ship. Whereas you can videocall back to your mother ship, if you have an iPhone with FaceTime video calling.)

Whatever it is, there is a huge leap forward in computing capabilities right now, which always really means a huge leap forward in communication capabilities. And there's an enormous amount of excitement about it, too.

I want to harness that excitement for learning purposes. My connections with our students this year indicate that they mostly want cosmetic improvements: they'd love it if all their faculty used Blackboard, for instance. And who can blame them? They want all their syllabi in one place - and in the cloud. But they're not really dying to revolutionize their class with these new technologies. They're perfectly comfortable using FourSquare to get discounts at Starbucks and taking the same college class that's been offered for years in the same way they've taken all their other college classes. If nothing else, we need to challenge them to ask the sorts of questions a college graduate needs to ask about the new technologies. (Do you really want FourSquare to amalgamate all that personal data about you?) But I'd like to challenge them to help faculty teach them differently, too. So many faculty and students alike are excited about these new tools and their new capabilities. I want that excitement in the classroom! How do we get there?

This year Hofstra sponsored a contest in the fall for students to vote for their favorite iPad App. Evernote won, with Dropbox a close second place, followed by iBooks and 3D Brain. This is an interesting result: the most popular apps were the ones that made living with your files in the cloud possible, followed by two apps that made it possible to do learning activities you could never do before: carry a hundred books with you, in full color, everywhere, or hold in your hand an interactive three-dimensional representation of the human brain. We need to circulate these results more widely among the faculty. How do we take advantage of such tools? Do we require students to get iPads? Can we share? How quickly will the "mobile computing" revolution reach almost everyone, how do we boost the students who need a boost to get there, and what can it do for learning, and by extension for our society?

We hope to learn more through a program we're running now loaning iPads first to faculty, then to one student in one of their classes. We hope the iPad gets used for an in-class activity. We suggested Google jockeying - the iPad lends itself well to a student looking something up, then passing the results around for others to see. But we expect we'll learn a lot from students who are trying them. As you might expect, once the glamour wears off, our students start to see that the iPad isn't a magical genie in a bottle fulfilling their every wish, either. Both the ups and downs of mobile computing should be visible to all - and examined carefully in an academic institution.

Faculty Computing and Student Computing will be sharing many new ideas from our results with these experiments! If you have other thoughts and ideas, please do share them with us.

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference 2011

2011-03-21T12:22:00.004-04:00

There were a lot of new topics floating around at this national conference in Washington, DC about a month ago. Some that you might want to know about:

*Open Source Textbooks

There are state and national initiatives to support the creation and dissemination of open source textbooks. These are important not only because they are free, but also, if they are released under a GPL/Creative Commons type license, because they are modifiable. So you can download an excellent textbook written by an excellent professor, and use only chapters 2 & 3, or rewrite chapter 6 if you'd like to.

Susan Henderson is managing both the Florida state effort at http://www.theorangegrove.org and the national, FIPSE-grant funded effort at http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org.

Interestingly, Susan presented along with Jade Roth, Vice President of Books & Digital Strategy from Barnes & Noble, our college bookstore operator (and lots of other people's). Jade was very clear that Barnes & Noble would be happy to distribute free content. They see the nook software as being their platform for distributing educational content to students on any device, be it a nook or a laptop or an iPad, and they want us to consider that our textbook distribution hub as well.

One thing I didn't yet see in the open source textbook movement is a true open source code management process. Ideally, if I rewrite chapter 6, I'd like to resubmit it for comment and review, and perhaps through a process of vetting and approval, my chapter 6 now becomes the chapter 6 of the core text. I can see why many faculty would not get excited about writing for open-source textbooks under such a model. But it may be crucial to develop something similar for such textbooks if they are to remain as current and useful as open source code is.

On a slightly different but related tack, Edward Gehringer, Associate Professor of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, presented about having his 120 computer science students "crowdsource" their textbook. The students wrote the textbook for their course in a collaboratively edited wiki. As you can imagine, this certainly qualifies as an active learning exercise, and the professor used an interesting review system to review contributions in a double-blind manner. I can't help but think that students asked to read primary material and synthesize their own textbook must have ended up understanding the material very well. One never understands anything as well as when one has to teach it - and how else could you have 120 students teaching each other?

*Open educational resources

We've long known about MIT and other schools posting free class material under the Open Courseware initiative, or OCW, begun in the 90s. A quick Google search turns up tons of institutions participating in OCW. But now there are schools posting entire courses for free on the web - something quite different from just course materials.

Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative can be found at http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning and offers complete online self-paced courses in subjects that include economics, statistics, biochemistry, physics, and French. Instructors are encouraged to customize the courses and reuse them; students are encouraged to undertake self-guided learning; and some students can take the courses for credit, if their institution has arranged for them to do so.

You can "peek" into the courses to see how they work, or enroll yourself. I looked at the French class, thinking that Madame Cousine, my first-year French teacher, might be pleased if I brushed up my French. The class made me think that indeed I could do so if I wanted to enroll, though when I looked at it in Chrome, Google offered to translate it out of the French and into English for me - rather defeating my purpose. The course looks like it covers rather less material than I remember Madame Cousine's class covering back in the 80s, but if it gets me as far as ordering lunch in Montréal, maybe it's a worthwhile resource. I need to take a closer look at the statistics class.

*Mixable

Purdue gave another great session on Mixable, their class/life/online sharing system that they are piloting this year with success. I don't think you can really tell from the website at http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning that Mixable is probably what a 21st century LMS should be. Students see their classes on the left, but any other resemblance to a current LMS/CMS (except perhaps Instructure's Canvas) is gone. Students can contribute to any class with any media, without the faculty member's blessing or need to organize groups. Students can take a picture of a molecular model they've been doodling out on a whiteboard with their cell phone and share it with the class immediately. The file stays in the class Dropbox, letting them share files throughout the semester. They can send messages to fellow classmates via Facebook or share a YouTube video just as easily, but students who wish to keep Mixable separate from their Facebook walls can do so. It all works on mobile devices including Droid phones and iPhones, including the Dropbox file sharing. And at the end of a class or their major, they can build a portfolio of notes or materials they've accumulated over the course of their learning - that's really learning course management.

Just this week some University of Pennsylvania students announced Coursekit, their own alternative to Blackboard, and I think these tools are just going to keep coming. It makes sense that students would be frustrated with a CMS/LMS that just lets the teacher direct discussion or contributions, and that teachers don't like having to jury-rig the tools either to allow students to contribute. Also, of course, while studies continue to show that students don't want class stuff in their Facebook, associated tools (like our new Hofstra on Facebook app from Inigral) allow students to create groups and contact others outside their personal Facebook profile and wall. I'm looking forward to seeing how these CMS/LMS contenders shake out. Adventurous faculty and dedicated students are going to love them.

*Faculty learning communities

We seem to have reached a tipping point where large swathes of the faculty population at a lot of schools want to learn about tools like blogging and eportfolios, and increasingly they're doing it together. Baylor University under the direction of the ever-creative Gardner Campbell did a great multi-institution development effort with faculty learning communities; Mercy College undertook a smaller, but very effective, approach inside their own school. In both cases, the office for instructional technology simply facilitated - primarily providing a communications infrastructure and perhaps pizza - and faculty did the teaching and learning, as they do so well.

I'm hoping to institute such faculty learning communities here at Hofstra next year. The iPad users' group meeting was well attended and productive (not their fault but mine that we haven't scheduled another meeting yet, but the ideas they generated are available for all in the All-Faculty Blackboard course at Hofstra). I'd like to see similarly motivating sharing going on between faculty interested in communication tools like blogs or Twitter, and faculty interested in data visualization tools like Google Earth or ArcView. We have people doing some great work on this here at Hofstra.

To that end, stay tuned - we are in the process of trying to arrange our second annual Teaching with Technology day, and all Hofstra faculty are invited!

A Week without the Web - going forward, not backwards

2011-03-08T18:51:00.003-05:00

I'm going to be very interested to see the results of the experiment being conducted now by faculty and students in Hofstra's School of Communication: A Week Without the Web. I particularly like that this is a thoughtful encounter with the web; it's not just wishing it was 1990 again, it's a true educational exercise, reflecting on where we are, how we got here, and where we want to go in the future.

I'm already interested by the site's inaugural post. Clearly the School has been discussing this for a while, and clearly if they can do without the web for a week, they cannot do without cellphones.

This echoes something we've been talking about in faculty and student computing. How do we harness cell phones for learning? Can we or should we do so? I thought Liz Kolb's book Toys to Tools was an eye-opener. The book is geared for the K12 teacher and student, and it's full of exercises that students can do to create media in exercises to explore and understand. I'm always alert to what's happening in K12 - we don't want 21st century learning experiences for our students in gradeschool, but 19th century learning experiences in college. At least not all the time. Some 19th century learning experiences are undoubtedly valuable. (And I just finished Claudia Schiff's book on Cleopatra: A Life. Some 1st century BCE learning experiences might not come amiss either!)

This goes back to one of our core operational guideposts: it's not what the faculty member does differently with technology, it's what the students do differently. We all know that there can be great lectures, and great lectures enhanced with PowerPoint - but take away the PowerPoint and most great lecturers can certainly stand alone. Active learning is that in which the student does something differently - a creation exercise, or an exploration exercise, in which the student uses technology to find, create, or share in ways that they couldn't before.

This can be anything from an annotated bibliography shared and co-created via GoogleDocs to a collection of audio interviews that students peer-evaluate. And cell phones are clearly the one tool that can now do it all - and that almost no student is without.

What do you think about harnessing the power of cell phones for learning? Has the time come for your class?

Yes, VIRGINIA, I believe in college

2011-02-09T18:53:00.002-05:00

Dear Editor:
I am 18 years old. Some of my friends say college is just a four-year hoop to jump through to get to the job I need. They say college has nothing to do with the real world. Papa says “If you see it on the web it must be true.” So tell me, Madame Blogger: should I believe in college?
---

Well, VIRGINIA, I believe in college. The United States originally conceived of its system of education as a necessary foundation for democracy, and I believe that an educated citizenry is what makes democracy work. A person who learns mathematics and philosophy, for instance, can explain why a nation cannot survive if its population constantly wants both increasing benefits of government and reductions to the size of government. That’s the sort of person ready to pick and choose what government should do, and vote accordingly.

There has been a lot of research, VIRGINIA, that what you need to be good at a job is to be able to learn new things quickly and effectively (perhaps even correctly). That you need to be able to evaluate information and make your own decisions. And that you need to be able to work with other people. College education can prepare you to be good at a job in these ways, though the connection might not be obvious. A person who studies science can learn how to use experiments to find answers to questions that are right, or at least closer to right than they were before. A person who studies history knows how to find out what has already been done. And a person who studies reading and writing can communicate a plan, or a solution, with one person, or a million people. A person who studies languages - maybe even art - can communicate that same plan or solution all over the world.

It may seem in college that not everything you do, not everyone you meet, is directly connected to your dreams. There are failures and pitfalls and shortcomings in college. These too are part of the real world. You will need to learn how to deal with failures and pitfalls and shortcomings, VIRGINIA. College is a good place for this.

Life is big and the world is big. Sometimes, confronted with the vastness of human knowledge, people become frightened, or nervous, or overwhelmed, and they pretend that it is small. College is big because the real world is big. Grasp that, and you will grasp everything.

So I think your friends are wrong. But I think your papa is wrong too. I think college is where you will learn when and how to believe what you perceive. You will learn to understand where a person comes from, what that person knows, and how that person makes his or her case, and you will factor that in to your understanding of what that person says. You will learn who you are too, and what you know, and you will learn to make your own case. More importantly, you will learn what you don’t know. And if your college is what it should be, you will learn how to learn what you need to learn, every time you need to learn something, for the rest of your life. There is always so much more to know that knowing how to learn is more important than knowing anything else.

And because of that, the best answer I can give you is that only you, VIRGINIA, can say whether or not you should believe in college. As with everything else in life, you should learn that for yourself. But I believe in college, VIRGINIA, and you should know that I do. It is a place, and a process, and a philosophy that I highly recommend.

Formative assessment

2010-12-07T13:51:00.002-05:00

Exciting title, no? I learned this phrase from the teams building our new medical school, though I'd already experienced the need for the term.

Summative assessment, as it turns out, is the type most of us are used to. We give an exam, or a paper, and we give a grade. Bam, the student is supposed to understand how well he or she did.

Problem is, usually with a summative assessment, that's it, the end of the road. We give those exams or papers at the end of the semester, and if the student didn't do as well as they (or we) had hoped, well, too bad, better luck next class.

I experienced the need for a different type of assessment during the painfully bad presentations my students gave the first time I taught my class on global media. Even in the midst of watching presentations that were sadly lacking in research, application of any of the theory we had supposedly learned through the semester, or even coherence, I realized that it wasn't the students' fault. It was my fault. Because no one gets something right the first time they do it. Even though those students had undoubtedly done presentations at some previous point in their lives, they hadn't done presentations for me, and they hadn't done presentations on global media.

Enter the idea of formative assessment. It's pretty simple, really: with this type of assessment, the student has opportunity and direction to improve. It happens a lot more frequently, and is followed by the opportunity to do better.

I like this much more than the habit of some of my colleagues to let students rewrite and rewrite a paper, for instance, until they get the grade they're shooting for. Of course students should be able to improve. But somehow rewriting a paper over and over always seemed like way too much work for me and not much payoff for them. Did they ever really understand what they were trying to do with the paper? Or did they simply apply what I asked them for in the notes until they got the grade they wanted? Plus, without a grade on the earlier drafts, there were no stakes to the work. I have noticed that students who know they will get a chance to (or be required to) rewrite papers repeatedly turn in papers that ... don't demonstrate a lot of pre-existing work.

Grades are stakes. Students understand that. But grades given more often, with therefore slightly lower stakes, can be an inducement to improve.

When I reworked my global media class, I had students give presentations almost every week. Not every student could do it, but every student had at least one opportunity to do it - and they were not only graded by me, they were graded by their colleagues, right there in the class. Want stakes? There's stakes. Students had a strong inducement to improve - and opportunity to do it. (The first students who presented got a chance to do it again later in the semester if they chose to do so. All of them chose to do so!)

I'm not even sure that formative assessment is that much more work for the professor. Low-stakes quizzes or short writing assignments (even informal ones, such as blog or discussion board posts) can be prepped ahead and even reused. Usually you're not trying to prevent cheating; you're just trying to give the student a signpost as to how well he or she is doing before he or she smashes into the brick wall of the end of the semester summative assessments.

I read an article this fall in which the author pointed out that most of the students we are now teaching are very familiar with one type of formative assessment: video games. At the end of any round in which you don't succeed, you die. Picture how students deal with this type of feedback, as opposed to the attitude with which they receive grades on smaller quizzes or papers. Do they ever try to negotiate with the game to re-do the round? No; they know they can, but they lose points/experience/time by losing the first time around. They seem to understand that they are getting tools, experience, and resources in the earlier rounds that they can use in the later ones, towards the climax of the game. Do they understand that about their educational experiences?

I'm not one who thinks that video games can be a part of any college class. But this analogy interests me, and I try to follow it when I think about formative assessment. Got an F on the quiz? Yep, well, you died this round; do better next time, or you might never make it to the end!

It also helps me to have really clear goals for the class. Ideally, of course, I'd like my students to remember something from the class about the relationship between economics and content in popular culture products worldwide, and maybe even remember a few salient facts about what's popular in Japan or Australia and why. But what I really want is for them to remember how to do research on their own and start stitching it together into their own analysis. I am, after all, still a recovering composition teacher: I want them to formulate a hypothesis and support it with research.

So to that end, I gave up most of my lectures about international media. As it happens, I got out pretty much everything I wanted to say about it in my reactions to my students' presentations. (Not too surprising.) And in hearing what I had to say, not as a lecture, but as a response to one of the students' presentations, I really think it had more import and more interest. They themselves asked the questions and set the stage. They created their own need to know. By responding, I gave them everything I really wanted them to know about, and probably more.

Their presentations, by the way, were really, really good. I am now a believer in formative assessment!

So if you want your students to accomplish something specific, I recommend giving them multiple chances to do it in a semester; attach stakes to the attempts; and give as much feedback as you can (though even just a letter grade is a good marker of success or failure) every time, to let them know how well they're doing and give them a chance to change direction whenever it's necessary.

Presentations, hot and not

2010-10-22T12:38:00.003-04:00

Everyone knows I think computers are evil and that they wait for the perfect moment to turn on us. That moment is often when one wishes to give a presentation.

Some thoughts about being prepared for presentations, and some newer ideas in presentation:

1. Turn on and log into your laptop before you need to start presenting! All you should have to do is wake your computer from sleep.

2. If you are hooking your laptop up to a foreign projector, try to make sure it works before you have to present. Just a few minutes before the "show" can save a lot of heartache when you present. At the very least, you'll know when you stand up that you don't have the visuals you planned on and can adjust your talk accordingly.

3. When at all possible, use the computer that's already there rather than hooking up yours. I usually have a Mac and the moment when I need to hook up my Mac to a regular VGA connector is the moment that the special Mac adapter goes missing - and the adapter is sufficiently different for different models and years that I can't guarantee someone else in the audience will have one. When I travel, I try to use a computer that's already there and set up for other presenters.

4. Suspenders, belt, and another belt. I put a backup copy of my EDUCAUSE presentation on a USB drive as well as uploaded one to a totally different Google account from the one in which it was living (my presenters and I collaborated on the presentation in GoogleDocs). Come hell or high water, I want to have at least one copy of the slides to show. Of course at that point version control is your issue. If you make changes up to the last minute, you won't have backup copies if you need them. Finishing BEFORE the last minute is therefore recommended.

Personally I hate PowerPoint and I hate bullet-text slides. Lots of people who've heard me say this over the years probably know I just gave a talk at EDUCAUSE with bullet-text slides (at least we built it in GoogleDocs). I feel like for a one-time talk, certainly for a conference, slides are forgivable because you do have talking points you don't want to forget, and usually data (even who you are and what school you're from) that you don't want to have to repeat or even say out loud but which are worth showing on the screen.

In the classroom, however, I strongly feel that bullet-text slides should be used sparingly, if at all. Graphs and images, by all means. But bulleted text is almost an instruction to the students to read, not listen to you; and if you darken the room at all, some tuning out, if not outright snoozing, is bound to follow.

I saw two innovations in presentation technology at EDUCAUSE that I thought were used to good effect:

First, several presenters used Prezi, the new tool that lets you build a presentation from a larger mind-map type of collection of text and images. I don't know why this is so much less boring than bullet-text slides, but it is. No matter how you focus, you know there's more image, more information or ideas, outside the frame of the screen at any one time, and somehow that's exciting. Plus just the movement indicates more of a physical relationship between the ideas than the linear march of slides. I really enjoyed the Prezi presentations that I saw and I intend to try this tool myself.

Another idea was a format, not a tool. Shelly Rodrigo's "You Are 3.0" panel used Ignite presentations to good effect. I think they were actually going more for a Pecha Kucha effect. Speakers spoke for just a couple of minutes each, with automatically advancing slides moving (sometimes with them, sometimes pushing them along, I will admit). This was almost a performance art style of presentation. The images and info on the screen amplified or illustrated what the presenters said, and added depth and interest to the presentations rather than flattening them out. The speed, while a challenge to follow (and probably a challenge to deliver), also contributed to the sense of receiving a rich but high-level idea - concepts or words stood out, not a flow of connected sentences that built together to form a cohesive linear whole.

I'm a big fan of sentences building on one another to form a cohesive whole, but in the same way that a picture of Ahab will not give me the entire substance of Moby Dick, a presentation seldom conveys everything interesting or valuable about what a presenter knows. I find I still want to read their papers or books, however, after an idea grasps me from a Prezi or Ignite presentation - and that doesn't always happen with bullet-text slides.

Peer feedback using clickers

2010-10-20T17:27:00.003-04:00

Some of the Boot Camp participants have already heard me describe how I used clickers this past spring for peer feedback on presentations in my global media class. It was based on an idea I got from Ling Huang, a colleague from the chemistry department and also a Boot Camp graduate. He had students use clickers to effectively "grade" each other on presentations they gave on laboratory methods. I had students "grade" each other (using a 5-point Likert scale) on how well the student's presentation had tackled the fundamental questions of the class.

Apparently this idea is going around, because the ProfHacker column in the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story this week from Derek Bruff, a math professor teaching a writing course for the first time, who used clickers to have his students give each other anonymous feedback on their essays in class.

I think everyone who's using it finds similar benefits: the feedback is anonymized but immediate, and it's quantified, which gives a reassuringly impersonal feel to the feedback even as the instructor can direct the discussion towards improvement right then and there. If more than half rate the thesis statement of an essay as unclear, for instance, the discussion can turn towards making it more clear without getting bogged down in whether or not any one individual thinks it is clear.

As a faculty member who's planning to try this told me, too, an instructor can gauge whether or not he's been clear on the topic at hand by whether or not the student responses are the same as his. If the entire class rates a thesis sentence clear, and it is NOT clear, then the instructor knows there's more work to be done there.

To facilitate trying out clickers in class, Faculty Computing Services is offering a "Happy Meal" try-it program with few choices and all the service provided by us. We will bring the receiver and clickers to your classroom, gather the data, and either show it on the screen for all to see or give you one of our new handheld receivers that lets you see the results in your hand. Separately from the try-it program, we are also arranging for students to be able to rent clickers from us, to make the cost of using clickers regularly in class the same as the cost of using the clicker-enabled smartphone or laptop software, if you decide to use clickers regularly.

As always, you can ask FCS more at the Faculty Support Center, in phone, by email, or in person. The use of the clickers themselves is simple; the exercises one can do with the clickers, however, have a lot of variation. And I think the variation where students give each other immediate feedback is one of the most exciting.

A very slow worry

2010-10-18T20:02:00.004-04:00

I often think of the beginning of "A Midwinter's Tale" when Michael Maloney talks about his nervous breakdown as a long slow buildup. Some nervous breakdowns come quickly, catastrophically, he says; others have more of a slow build. He, he says, is 33 years old and this nervous breakdown had started when he was 7 months old and was just starting to really get a grip.

I've been worried about higher education's relationship to communication technologies since, oh, about 1994. Clearly not every class needs a technology component; clearly technology should only be used to serve the class' learning goals. But how much is too much, and how much is not enough? Not every faculty member needs to be able to communicate using 21st century methods. But how many should? Not every student needs guidance in being a digital citizen. But how many is the right number?

The Chronicle and other reports on higher education are filled with fear and numbers. How many credit hours will be required for students to get financial aid? How much profit is for-profit education making? At what age should professors retire? How much does it cost a student to earn a degree versus how much will they earn in the career they get after they earn it?

Few ask the overarching questions. Politicians don't like such questions because they don't lead to good soundbites and faculty don't always like them either. I hear way too many people on campuses responding to these questions with the answers "everyone knows" - unexamined. They're uncomfortable questions when they seem like challenges to the status quo. What is the purpose of higher education? If it is to educate workers and not citizens, what should our curricula look like? Likewise if it is to educate citizens and not workers? What should a college-educated person know or be able to do? What are our responsibilities as faculty to change higher education in general?

And then the technology-related subquestions: what should a college graduate know about networking or digital security? What should they know about digital privacy? What will the educated citizen or worker do with the technological resources available to him or her through the rest of his life? How should college be preparing our students to do those activities?

Then here's the real kicker: How long can we ignore these questions?

Most leading colleges and universities are struggling with the same questions and activities that we are. We have many digital resources - but not an infinite amount. To what should we be allocating our resources? This always leads me back to the same questions I ask myself: How many classes using technology is the right number? How many faculty should be tweeting, how many should be wiki-ing, how many should teach students what code looks like, how many should expect students to demonstrate the ability to write a lucid blog post? How many should touch on media literacy, video composition, local and global inequities in technology resources, or the ethics of Photoshop? If we have 600 classes posting syllabi online but only 50 using discussion boards actively, is that enough? Do our students feel that learning is a 21st century activity and are we equipping them to do it for themselves for the rest of their lives?

To me there are a lot of reasons to use technology in teaching, and I've already blogged about some of them: more time on the task at hand outside of the classroom, more writing and reading experience, more opportunities for feedback, more accommodation for different learning styles. But there's one compelling reason I keep coming back to figuring out what to do next: because our students practically live online, but they don't learn there. It would be a shame (yes, I said this in The Chronicle years ago, I'm still recycling the line,) it would be a shame if the only things our students couldn't do online is learn.

The right number of teachers using technology and the right number of technology-enhanced classes is whatever number it takes to make sure that all of our students have a chance to learn how to learn using these tools. The right number is whatever number it takes to convince them that learning is a 21st-century activity, not a 19th-century one. The right number is whatever it takes to get them engaged and active now and not thinking that a class is just a hurdle to jump over.

I don't know what that number is, but I have been worrying for more than 15 years that we're somewhere below that number, and the worry is juuuuuust starting to get a good grip.

Compute for critical thinking

2010-09-30T10:15:00.003-04:00

I really enjoyed Michael Bérubé's visit to Hofstra yesterday to discuss the future of liberal arts. I love his presentation style - I am a recovering English student, I love presentations sprinkled with Searle and rescues of Habermas. But more importantly I always find Dr. Bérubé to be a clear-minded thinker, as clear about the value of separating social facts from brute facts as he is clear about the problems facing grad students when it comes to employment and the adjunctification of our universities.

If there is an intersection between what I've studied and what I do - and I'm not saying there is one - the intersection is precisely where liberal arts instruction becomes practical. We all want to graduate students who can express themselves clearly in writing, for instance. That's a classic liberal arts value and while I don't know how far back it dates I do know that it is found everywhere in higher ed from the Ivies to the community colleges. Students will neither get nor keep jobs if they can't express themselves in writing.

I don't know if you've noticed, but the blogosphere runs on writing.

Why not have more informal as well as formal writing opportunities for our students? If we want them to be able to write a lucid email, blog, or Twitter post, shouldn't they be trying it out in our classes?

Or if you'd rather spork yourself to death than admit you want your students to write a lucid blog, don't you suspect that if they spent more time writing blogs that garnered them feedback, they might develop better habits of clarity, organization, and persuasion that would leak over into their essays?

I suspect it. When I use discussion boards in my classes I am sneakily providing a venue for increased informal writing that nonetheless gets feedback and ultimately a grade. It may well be that students are consistently better at compartmentalizing their writing tasks than we are at assigning them, and that just because they do, over the course of a semester, learn to write a lucid, even persuasive discussion board post, they may well still write texts to one another that consist of "@lib where u@?".

That doesn't bother me. I think of the delightful contrast between very high-culture poetic rhetoric and street swearing that we saw in the TV series "Deadwood", for instance. David Milch, the award-winning screenwriter, purposefully played with that opposition in his dialog, as he felt that people of the 19th century who had any education at all read things like Shakespeare and that their language was indeed a salty combination of iambic pentameter and words that would make a sailor blush. Dr. Bérubé's own rhetoric, I think, is made all the more effective by alternating between extremely targeted summaries of extremely rich texts like Contingencies of Value and Internetisms like "YMMV" (your mileage may vary). When I went to school, admittedly a million years ago in a land far, far away, it was expected that education would enable us to be able to switch registers from formal English to the sort of English we heard around us every day and also spoke. That doesn't mean that Shakespeare doesn't get discussed in the language of Pennsylvania farmers - or high school students. It totally does. To insist that Shakespeare only be discussed in a register befitting Shakespeare is to lose much of the value of studying Shakespeare: his language enriches ours and understanding his stories enriches our understanding of our own. Add your own discipline's core text here.

So let's toy with the idea that having students communicate electronically and informally about their classes is a valuable rhetorical exercise rather than the end of the liberal arts as we know it. Maybe they are spending less time on homework; certainly they are spending more time working at jobs; but if, in the twenty minutes they have to spend on it, they write up a blog post about the topic of your class that they spent some of their work shift thinking about, isn't that a net win for education?

Our instructional designers and technologists can help you come up with any number of exercises that can take advantage of students' omnipresent ability to add their thoughts to the Internet via text. We'd be happy to help you. And if you have an exercise you love, please let your nearest FCS staffer know about it so we can write it up as a case study and share it with other Hofstra faculty!

Mini-Catalyst Boot Camps!

2010-09-16T12:21:00.002-04:00

Since 2006 we've been offering four-day workshops we call Catalyst Boot Camp every spring right after commencement and right before spring classes start.

We're right to call it a Boot Camp because it's pretty intensive. For five hours a row every day we show faculty almost every technology in broad usage in American higher education. The technology comes in groups - in-class technology, audio & video technology, Things that Plug Into Blackboard, more cutting-edge tools like virtual reality or data visualization - and we try to surround each session with some discussion of why these tools (or any particular tool) might or might not be useful for a particular faculty member.

Each Boot Camp has a wrap-up session and they often say very similar things: why didn't we know all this was available to us? And they report the discussion about how and why to teach this way was more useful than the review of the tools. We always ask the same question: how do we involve all the rest of the faculty in this program? And so we've come up with this blog and these mini starter sessions.

We've had more than 75 graduates now of our Boot Camp program but of course we'd like all faculty to be able to take advantage of it. So I'm pleased to say that this fall we're offering a couple of meetings - just an hour and a half each - where we'll talk about the basic rules of thumb of Boot Camp, rules of thumb that can help an instructor choose a technology that matches her pedagogical goals, won't be out of date in five minutes, and won't kill her with a ton of extra work. I'm sorry to say that in that time frame, I'll probably do most of the talking, but hopefully you'll get some good ideas from other colleagues who attend too.

I'm also blogging here about lots of these topics. So if you aren't able to join us for the mini-Boot Camps this fall, I hope you'll be able to get some use from the posts here. I'm a lot more directed when I have specific faculty in front of me teaching specific classes and we can talk about your specific teaching goals. You can get the same kind of service when you visit our Faculty Support Center, where if you tell one of our professionals what problem you're trying to solve (students don't keep up with homework? don't talk in class? don't understand a key concept? We have apps for that,) we'll help you find an appropriate solution. If you want an instructional technology consultant to advise you about that specific goal, just give us a visit. If you want to really become tech-savvy, up-to-date instructors familiar with the field of instructional technology, then sign up for the full Boot Camp. If you're not sure if the whole four days will be worth it, I can tell you that many of your colleagues think it was, but perhaps if you attend one of these mini starter sessions, you'll get a better sense of whether or not it will work for you.

The mini-Boot Camp sessions will happen at the following times and we'll take up to eight participants to each one (please don't attend if we haven't confirmed we have space for you!):

* Thursday Sep. 23 2 p.m. - 3:30
* Friday. Oct. 29 11:30 a.m. - 12:45
* Wednesday Nov. 3 11:30 a.m. - 12:45

All Boot Camps run on food. We're big believers in food here in Faculty Computing Services.

If you'd like to sign up for a mini-session, please RSVP to my assistant, Jackie Waxon, at 3-6070. If you can't attend this fall we will do more in the spring.

Happy fall semester!

A Starting Point

2010-09-07T17:31:00.000-04:00

Happy new fall semester! Our students are back and while parking is a little tougher, I love the energy and freshness of the campus when classes start again in the fall. It's a whole new year.

So let's start the year on this blog with a more in-depth discussion of the tool with which I encourage everyone to start if they've never used a technology tool in their classes: the discussion board.

There are many discussion boards but when we say "the discussion board" we mean the Blackboard discussion board. There are many good reasons just from a housekeeping point of view to start with a Blackboard tool. More than 80% of our students have an active Blackboard class each semester, so chances are most of your students already know how to use it. It's easy to learn, for first-year students who might not have used it before. And because our Blackboard system is tied in with our student administration system, students and faculty can just click on the "Bb" icon in the portal at my.hofstra.edu and be taken directly into Blackboard.

Blackboard is far from an ideal pedagogical tool. Its reliance on the idea that teaching consists of giving handouts and collecting papers, for instance, annoys me almost every day except for those days on which it offends me. The discussion board is the finest of 1999 design, and students sometimes find it confusing that they either don't see posts once they've read them, or that they do see them all and have to move to the new ones. Once you give in and get used to the quirks of Blackboard's discussion board, though, you can use it very easily to do some very serious work.

I always prefer to introduce new tools by giving the students asynchronous work, that is, work that they're going to do outside of class. This is partly because computers are evil and will turn on you when you have your class staring at you. I prefer to give all the students a chance to work out their own technology issues for themselves. I refuse to become the Help Desk. Cries for password resetting help or fixing your computer's network connection need to be directed to the Student Computing help desk, not to the teacher. But you can help that process along by realizing that computers turn on the students occasionally too, and giving them, say, several days to complete an assignment online (such as contributing to a discussion board) is very helpful to all involved.

I also give every class an "I didn't see you swing". Students should get a shot at a practice post which doesn't count just to make sure they can get all the buttons under control. There may well be one or two students for whom web discussions are new (there are still a few students for whom this is new) and they need a chance to figure it out and perhaps go to Student Computing to get help before being required to do it for class. That said, however, the deadline on the second post is firm. Otherwise students may start to feel that the work isn't necessary for the class and let it go.

When I was in college I had a chance to take a year-long course with the wonderful Katrin Burlin, who asked us to turn in reading response journals every week. I know many of our faculty do something similar. It became clear to me as a student that other people were writing interesting things in their reading responses, and I wished I could read them. Photocopying all those journals is really inefficient (though there are some people who do it). But having the journals posted instead to a discussion board is very simple.

So no matter what I'm teaching, I ask the students to write a reading response post in the discussion board every week, usually by 10 p.m. a day or two before my first class of the week. I try to follow in Katrin Burlin's footsteps. She did an excellent job of preparing short lectures, and more importantly discussion, based on what had inspired or concerned students the most in their reading responses. I try to do the same.

Moreover, I ask students to respond to their colleagues as well as post their own response. In my classes it has not worked well to ask them both to post a statement and to post a response to at least one other person's statement. It seems to follow their inclinations better to just require them to post, and to discuss in class how to respond substantively with one another. ("I agree" is not a substantive post; "I agree for the following reasons..." may well be substantive.) Students who prefer to state their minds first do so, and other students who prefer to riff off of discussion tend to respond. My students know they only need to post once a week, but on good weeks (especially after midterms) discussion gets quite involved, and sometimes even tangents that we don't get time to explore in class may be followed by students who have the freedom of the electronic forum in which to do it.

I don't respond to everyone's posts after the first week or so, and even those first responses from me are just to get everyone steered in the right direction. Students know that they need to raise questions or points of interest, that they can respond to each other in an academic fashion as much as they like, and that I will be basing classroom discussion on what they discuss. They also know, because it's in my syllabus, that posting will be a certain percentage of their grade (usually something relatively low, like 10%), and that posting is required to pass the class. (I spell out that last part for the occasional student who figures she or he is going to ace the rest of the class so they can just ignore the pesky discussion board and they'll still have their 90.) The discussion board grading tool in Blackboard makes it easy to collect each student's posts for the semester, count them (if you are so inclined) and see them all in one place so as to grade the student's work. I just give credit for doing the assignment, and the grade falls each time they fail to post - four weeks without a discussion board post and they've basically opted out of an important part of the course, so I don't mind giving a 60 for it. (I tend to use 100-point scales for grades in my class.) But if a student fails to post for a week or two I do reach out to them and make sure they know how it's affecting their grade and ask if there's anything I can do to help.

I find this is a very effective way to use technology to get students thinking about the assigned work outside of class and to make sure they're keeping up with it all, as well as to give me pointers regarding what they find interesting and how to prepare for the week's classes. I don't know if many students nowadays would even regard this as much "technology" in the class. No Twitter, blog, podcast or clicker; but still, I think, a pretty effective use of technology for my pedagogical purposes.

I don't even think faculty should feel like a discussion board is "just" a place to start and that they must thereafter graduate to ever more current uses of technology. The discussion board tends to get contributions from students who are otherwise quiet in class, keeps all the students moving forward together, increases the time spent on classwork each week and increases interactions between students rather than with you. It meets all my requirements for a very up-to-date use of teaching technology. There are a zillion other ways to go if you want, but if you only used the discussion board effectively in your classes, I would think that you could consider yourself an instructor using teaching technology very effectively.

New tools make video integration easy

2010-08-25T13:39:00.000-04:00

For fall 2010 we've acquired two new tools at Hofstra that we think faculty will find very useful.

All faculty now have access to VoiceThread. VoiceThreads can be embedded right in your Blackboard course. In a VoiceThread, there's something that takes center stage; it can be a video, a chart, a photo, a document, an equation, a proof, anything. Students comment on the center stage and their comments form a frame around it. Students can comment in video (using the built-in camera and mic on almost every new laptop or desktop), audio (they can even use the phone to post a comment), or just typed text.

We've seen faculty use VoiceThread to generate online discussion outside of class on varying performances of King Lear; on student presentations; on laboratory demonstrations; on mathematical proofs; on foreign language videos; or comparing J.S. Bach and Paul McCartney.

The discussion board in Blackboard is still the fastest, easiest way to generate outside-of-class discussions. Make posting a structured, graded activity and participation will shoot up. (Plus I'm always a fan of getting students to write more!) But VoiceThread is a great option if you want to get to know your students better or have them get to know each other better, or if you think the visual material on which you want them to comment deserves visual responses. Students seem to enjoy seeing each other's responses, and because the responses are tied to a moment in the presentation on the center stage, you can hear/see/read the comments in order of response. If you think written responses tend toward the incivil because they may be more anonymous, see if you can get your students to give honest but professional feedback to each other with VoiceThread.

In addition, we have added a limited number of licenses for Echo360 Personal Capture. I personally am very excited about this product because I used it in my class in the spring to create a short video on how to do library searches, and it only took me about half an hour. I assigned the students to watch the video and then follow the guidelines presented in the video to find a book on their research topic and send me the listing - and they did pretty well! Echo360 Personal Capture records both you (in audio or preferably video and audio, again through the camera built in to your desktop or laptop), AND what is happening on your screen, then it automatically combines the two recordings into one video and publishes it for you. You don't get to make a lot of editing choices with Echo360 - only where to stop or start the video. But it does a great job of deciding when to show you (primarily when you're talking!) and when to show the screen (primarily when you're typing or mousing!). You can even re-use the resulting videos from class to class - in fact we'd hope you would, since then you don't need to spend the time to create the video over and over again.

Both Echo360 Personal Capture and VoiceThread integrate into your Blackboard course, which as always is the launching pad for any online activity for your class at Hofstra. If you'd like to try one of these new tools, perhaps in a pilot capacity this semester (or in a much more core capacity for the spring), please visit us in the Faculty Support Center in McEwen 215 and let us help you get started. We will need to activate the account for you.

We're looking forward to seeing you this fall! As always we're available at 516-463-6894, or you can email the fcshelp account at hofstra.edu for fastest online services.

Do you really want to be your own hacker?

2010-08-20T14:49:00.000-04:00

I find the ProfHacker columns at the Chronicle of Higher Education both useful and disturbing. Useful because they do often contain info on the newest tools, tips you can use (backup your files and TEST your backups!), and pointers to great resources that faculty don't often find on their own.

They're disturbing to me as well, though, because I have a belief that faculty don't want or need to be techies. Maybe I'm wrong, but I really don't think most faculty have the time to try all these new tools and methods, and it creates an unnecessary sense of stress to imply that they should. Other articles the Chronicle of Higher Education and other news sources frequently (and unnecessarily) frame the division between faculty who do use technology and faculty who don't as combative. If it's combative, it's at least partly because some faculty feel defensive about the fact that they don't spend whatever spare time they have testing out the latest Zotero features or loading up an iPad. And they shouldn't have to feel defensive about it, because they shouldn't have to do it. It's not their area of expertise.

In our Faculty Computing Services department we try almost everything. If we read about it, we try it, limited only by the time we can squeeze from all our other responsibilities. And we're nerds; we like testing new technology products.

When we find something that we think is stable, mature, widespread, affordable, cross-platform, easy to use, and useful in more than one academic discipline, we take it to our faculty to try it out. We ask for pilot volunteers, we show it at department meetings, we send out flyers, we offer our support services for it. Some products take off and some don't. But I think of us as advocates for our customers, trying out all the latest so that they don't have to. We're frequently wrong about what our faculty will actually want. I was surprised in one Boot Camp that the mathematician didn't care about the SmartBoard at all (finally!, I thought, a way to write but save equations! She didn't care. She had a working method already,) but the musician was very excited at the idea of an infinite supply of new staff paper, also savable for future classes. So we try to show you more than we think you will care about. But we try to limit ourselves to things we know will work.

Moreover, we try to focus on things that give the students new learning experiences. We never want to increase administrative overhead for our faculty. There are a lot of tools that can support the inevitable record-keeping function of teaching, and we try to support those. We have many faculty who ask us how to do weighted grading in Excel, for instance, or do quizzes online to reduce the time to collect and return them. But we try to focus on tools that let the student, more than the instructor, do something new. The faculty member may have been to the Louvre - but for a student the online tour is still new. Students blogging, we think, is more instructionally relevant -if it's core to the course and graded - than faculty members blogging. Having students create a shared research database is perhaps more to the instructional point than a faculty member's own Zotero database - though that tool is great for its own purposes as well.

So I guess I'm saying that I certainly see why some profs want to be their own ProfHackers. If that's your thing, I hope you'll let us know in Faculty Computing when we can spread the word to your colleagues that some particular tool or methodology is super-great. I try to gear our services toward the faculty who have new teaching ideas but aren't as interested in the techie side of how to do what they want to do, and we help them with that. I hope none of our faculty feel like they aren't up-to-date as teachers if they aren't testing Twitter dashboards or PowerPoint alternatives. And if you want to develop your own personal OpenCourseware Strategy, I hope you'll call upon the consultants in FCS to help you with that. We can loan you tools, help you wade through copyright issues, and perhaps even suggest resources to include. We're the nerds. We're like that.

We're always here for when technology doesn't make sense.

2010-07-30T14:40:00.000-04:00

I try to make sure that I and my staff spend most of our time teaching faculty some basic rules of thumb that don't change. We try to be less about what button to push than about the meta discussion. Does the tool increase student interactivity? Then try it. If it doesn't, ignore it and focus on something that does. The bigger discussion often gets lost in many IT departments (or in many service calls) where the customer comes in with a question about pushing a button but what they're doing is actually not going to achieve their goals.

Sometimes, though, the tool just doesn't make sense, and then our job becomes overcoming the usability barrier for the customer. I suppose I could look at this as job security, but I don't. I just get angry that the tool isn't easier to use. Twenty years into the computer revolution, a lot of software still isn't as good as it could be.

The question I just got was about iTunes. A frustrated user (and I assume a "user" is "someone who has things to do other than fighting with the computer") had spent hours just trying to put some songs on an iPod. I knew what the answer was and went over to show them. If you can't or don't want to sync your entire music library to an iPod, then you have to make a playlist - at least one, though you could make more - and then click on the iPod device, the Music tab, click "Sync selected playlists", and click the playlists you want to sync.

From a technical perspective there are two problems with this. One is that it is stupid to assume by default that the user wants to sync the entire library. Music libraries are so large now that Apple might want everyone to upgrade to the largest possible iPod to hold it all, but that's not a practical option for most users. Also, people don't always want to be immobilized by freedom of choice on their iPod - maybe they just want to listen to an album this week, and next week have a different album. (Remember when albums were important?)

Second, even assuming that interface needs required the creation of a playlist to be the subset of the music library that is synced, the user should be able to drag and drop that playlist on the device. Everything else on the Mac works by drag and drop. Why not this? It's perverse of the designers to force you to click on the device, then the Music tab, then the "Sync selected playlists", then the playlists. That's four clicks for what should be one drag-and-drop. OK, Apple, you're pissed we didn't buy a bigger iPod, but is this really fair retaliation?

I have other gripes about iTunes. Even though Apple engineers claim to my face that it is 508 compliant, it can't actually be used by the blind to, say, create playlists. You can use it to play individual songs, if you're willing to scroll through all the songs and find the one you want one by one, but that's about it. You say you should be able to type a few letters of the song's name to go right to it? I agree with you - what's the keystroke that toggles between the playlist frame and the search box? Oh. Yeah. There isn't one. That's not usability.

But I'm really only talking about iTunes as an example in the field. Not all software is great - in fact, some software is pretty crappy - and we still all use it for something or other. NPR reported this week that Facebook scored with the cable company and airlines in customer satisfaction. Yet people use it - a LOT of people use it. In fact all the social media sites scored pretty low. Yet "everyone" uses them (not everyone, but a large percentage of the population).

Software shouldn't be bad. People shouldn't need technical assistants to get over shibboleths that keep them from doing what they need or want to do. My staff shouldn't be spending their time helping people over these barriers to entry. But we do, and we have to, and I'm right to be cranky about it - because software among all other things doesn't have to be bad. It is a product of the imagination. Barring some actual constraints (bandwidth and processing power are not infinite), software should be elegant and easy. Obviously, enough people find iTunes and Facebook easy to use that the companies and their products have big market shares. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't or couldn't be better.

Meanwhile, my staff are happy to explain the secret doors and weird handshakes. We will help you make a magical playlist and get it to sync to your iPod. As long as our faculty are willing to meet us on the way - as long as they do learn the things they need to do to be productive - we will always be here to help with that. Some faculty, a very few, want "digital servants" to just use the tool for them. We can't do that - we will never be able to do that - because it doesn't scale. No college or university can afford digital servants for all their faculty. But a college or university who wants faculty to innovate in teaching has to provide staff who can talk about the big picture - pedagogical goals - and still have time to explain how to get the thing to do what you want it to do, especially when that isn't clear at all.

That's what we're here for. Feel free to call us up and ask us how to sync to your iPod. And then tell us how we can help you with the class you're teaching this fall.

Do online work outside of class

2010-07-20T13:48:00.000-04:00

My favorite rule of thumb: Anything to do with technology that has to happen for your class should happen outside the classroom. Inside the classroom you want to use that precious time to have your students talk to each other and to you. Sometimes you even want to talk to them. If you have them do online journaling or reading responses before class, or take a computer-graded quiz (for low stakes, but required,) then they tend to hit the ground running and the classroom discussions are awesome.

I love this quote from a recent news article about a faculty member making her class hybrid (some class time online, some class time face to face): "And by putting slides and videos online instead of trying to show them in class, she no longer had to worry about classroom tech glitches that took time away from teaching." (http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/jul/18/um-system-aims-close-gaps/)

We work like crazy to make sure technology in the classrooms always does work. But invariably that one time it doesn't is the time I have all my students sitting there staring at me. Computers are evil and out to get us humans, and classroom systems still are a bit too complicated to perfect no matter how much time and money you spend. I love getting the technology interaction outside the classroom. I still use in-class AV, of course, especially when I'm talking or when students are presenting (which is a lot in my classroom), but it isn't as crucial as the activities students do outside of class, not to their understanding or even participation.

Personally I have always added the online component asynchronously to my classes. I never have trouble filling class time; there's always more the students want to say and I want to say. And I have homework expectations. I don't think it's that onerous for a student to read some material to prep for class, then write a (brief, informal, online) reading response and perhaps take a 15-minute self-graded quiz. It keeps us all on track, including me, since I can tailor what we talk about in class to what students liked or didn't get about the readings.

But the hybrid model deserves attention too. When your students really do a significant amount of work online, a hybrid model makes sense. How much "significant" is, and whether or not your department will allow hybrid courses, is a topic for discussion with your department and school colleagues. And more and more information is trickling out that it may be the most "effective" learning experience - whatever that is - of the three options. Turns out perhaps all face-to-face or all online aren't better after all! I love compromise.

Word clouds, timelines, and mind maps

2010-07-12T15:11:00.001-04:00

There's a lovely article in one of the New York Times' blogs from this weekend about consumer tools to use in the classroom. I shouldn't even call them consumer tools, as they're programs available to everyone for free. But they're not tools that we in faculty computing need to set up or authorize for you - they're out there and you can use them whenever you like.

There are some great ideas for using wordles/word clouds, especially to help students visualize the main concepts of a piece of prose or to identify words to look up. And the timeline tools are new to me. I can think of some great uses for building a timeline with a class. I know Professor Cox, for instance, has his students build a short history of psychology in one of his classes - perhaps a timeline would be useful to them, in addition to or instead of a wiki. I can imagine all sorts of patterns turning up if students were able to collaborate on a timeline, adding what they thought were pertinent points of development as they go and seeing each other's contributions. I don't know if any of these tools allow for collaboration.

But I do think they left one of the best tools out of the mind map/brainstorming category. I have long used Inspiration myself and I've shown it to some Boot Camps as well. They have a new product Webspiration which I believe is free and which this article doesn't mention. Inspiration itself is well worth the purchase price (and I don't say that about much software) for any student or for that matter faculty member who needs to organize ideas or research into writing. I love the feature that, with the click of a button, turns your mind map into a linear outline that you can continue to edit in Word. This tool helped me throughout graduate school and beyond and I can't imagine that any other writer wouldn't also it useful. The Webspiration version has all the key features and seems to work well.

One other tool I'll mention for the writing crowd, since I know we have a number of filmmakers and journalists over in our School of Communication: Scripped, at http://scripped.com, is the GoogleDocs of screenwriting. It's free and your documents live online and you can collaborate live with others as well. I used the standard film script format and it worked flawlessly for me. Worth checking out before you invest in a paid product if a student is just going to try one scriptwriting class.

Publicizing our faculty wherever we go

2010-07-08T15:32:00.000-04:00

I've been struggling to figure out how to publicize what we do at Hofstra in the area of instructional technology more. It's hard to have regular "publicity" that doesn't sound like it's all about Me or even all about My Staff. To me the revolution is what happens every day. Like many schools, we have fantastic forward-thinking faculty who are leaders in the area of teaching with technology, but I think it's a failure if those faculty are our only actively innovating faculty. I'm really pleased with the percentage of Hofstra faculty who aren't just using basic tools in a way that replicates old teaching methods (here's your handouts in Blackboard, yawn), but are really teaching in a twenty-first century way.

To me (me again!), that's about communicating with our students and constantly connecting them with new material or new ideas. This is the information age. Computers are great for communicating. Most faculty keep up to date with late-breaking news in their field with online tools... but few faculty show that activity to their students. Even fewer ask students to then make the next great leap: connect the new idea with good solid research or reflective synthesis. Integrate what you know into your knowledge base into an academically responsible way!

Here's a video of Terri Shapiro, one of our psychology professors, talking about using Twitter with her class.

(You'll notice that Terri makes the choices that make learning a new tool worthwhile: it's fundamental to the class, it's graded, and it's essentially reusable - she could do what she's doing with any class she teaches.)

Now I don't want to damn Terri with faint praise by saying she's not necessarily a techhead. She's an involved, innovative teacher who uses many of our services here at Hofstra Faculty Computing Services. But I wouldn't call her an early adopter. I'd like to think she's not even that far ahead of the curve in relationship to other Hofstra faculty. This is the sort of customer that I hope represents many if not most of our faculty: someone who's trying something new and using it to make her class more alive, more clearly connected to the world at large.

These are the people who are making a difference. It's them, not us.

Remote support for classrooms, better services for faculty, smarter inventory

2010-06-30T15:55:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to report that Hofstra's Media Engineering group has deployed Extron's Global Viewer product to enable remote support for all the University's technology-enhanced classrooms. When a faculty member calls the Faculty Support Center we will be able to see if their projector is on or off and turn it on or off for them, as well as select an input source. This will tremendously shorten the response time for such calls at the beginning of the semester when faculty are returning to the classroom. The system will notify us via SMS text and email if an AV controller freezes and needs a hard restart, and also when projector bulbs reach their end of life. We will also be able to collect data on when and how our technology classrooms are used, helping us to plan better for these resources as well as target new idea suggests for faculty who may want them.

I'm incredibly proud of Joshua Daubert and his staff, who suggested and then implemented this exciting project. I'm looking forward to all the great results this will bring. Thank you, gentlemen!