Interest in Second Life seems to be in a resurgence at Penn lately. In March, PennGSE and Cornell University held a workshop on Taxonomies of Virtual Worlds for Education organized by Yasmin Kafai, and in May, the Wharton School held the Virtual Worlds in Academia Symposium organized by Tim Allen. In recent weeks, langauge lecturers in Japanese and Persian have been exploring Second Life hands-on. Deke has set up a new SIG (special interest group) email list called VIRTWORLD-SIG for all at Penn who are interested in exploring virtual worlds.

The attention-grabbing headline of this report states, “The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes…was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face.”

However, the authors provide this important caveat:

“Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium. In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages. At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction”

Later in the report the authors mention,

“Studies in which analysts judged the curriculum and instruction to be identical or almost identical in online and face-to-face conditions had smaller effects than those studies where the two conditions varied in terms of multiple aspects of instruction” (page xvi)

and

“In terms of instructional features, the online learning conditions in these studies were less likely to be instructor-directed (8 contrasts) than they were to be student-directed, independent learning (17 contrasts) or interactive and collaborative in nature (23 contrasts). Online learners typically had opportunities to practice skills or test their knowledge (42 effects were from studies reporting such opportunities).” (page 17)

In my humble opinion, this study validates the effectiveness of a variety of pedagogical techniques and thoughtful course design.  These techniques can be applied to both online and traditional courses; the pedagogy matters more than the medium.

An article which summarizes the findings of the report is available at

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/29/online

and the full report is available at

http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

Facebook is particularly suited for language practice. During the 2008 – 2009 academic year,  I implemented a Facebook project for GRMN 101 and GRMN 102. The original thought behind the project was to have students create online portfolios for their written work and essays. Within this online space students could also share and comment on each other’s work. In the past, I used Bb’s Threaded Discussions and Blogs for student portfolios. However, this time I wanted to expand the project and have students work in a more socially authentic environment that would be familiar to most of them as a means of communicating and circulating information. It was my hope that students could then experience language practice as a meaningful exercise designed for them to become acquainted with each other in a less formal setting. For that reason, I choose Facebook. Below is a screen shot and short writing sample from one student’s post in Facebook.

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You may notice that the author of the above post uses an alias. In this instance, the alias is that of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For this project, students were required to choose an alias that referenced a known German artist, philosopher or scientist. Students were not permitted to invite personal contacts to join the group. Membership was limited to only students from the class.

Students frequently combined their knowledge of the personalities they adopted in Facebook with details of themselves. This combination seemed to foster a playful use of the language even at the elementary level. Furthermore, the images that students used to illustrate their ideas may have contributed to stimulating their creativity and imagination. The translation of Goethe’s post in the example above is: “When I was still young and innocent, I was amazed about a lot. I thought that this world was exceptional. I laid in the sun and had fun in the present.”

Students also posted longer writing samples. As was the case with most of their written assignments, students were encouraged to illustrate their stories through images. In the story below, the student describes a fictitious battle that he imagines between himself and the monsters floating in his cereal bowl. The story gradually develops into a modern day fairy tale.

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Besides providing students the opportunity to share their written work, students were also able to notify each other in the target language about their current status. Moreover, students were able to comment on each other’s posts and ask questions; e.g., in the post below, Goethe wrote that he “is dreaming.”  Heidi Klum asks later: What are you dreaming?” Goethe responds: “I dreamt that I was a goalie in the NHL.”  Other status updates and posts by students follow this interaction.

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Facebook offered students different venues for reinforcing their language learning. In the example above, we see how students outside the classroom are able to correspond with each other about their daily activities and thus personalize their language experience. In addition to describing what they were doing at a particular moment, students also described their hobbies and personal interests in art, music and culture. In Facebook, students were able to provide examples of their interests not only through images but through other forms of multimedia such as video and links to other web sites. Facebook also provided students with an authentic environment in which to post their exchanges. Students could easily switch the language of the interface to German and change all menus and instructions to the target language.

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Facebook was perhaps a factor in changing some of the dynamics of the course by facilitating a peer learning environment, in which the students could teach each other content. Although German rock music was not on the syllabus, students initiated their own discussion of German rock bands by posting music videos in Facebook that they found on YouTube. On occasion, students not only exchanged music videos but also shared the lyrics for each other to read which the lengthy text in the next post illustrates

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It was difficult to prevent inaccurate uses of the language since most posts were not checked before appearing in Facebook. However, there were opportunities in class to review student posts in Facebook, make suggestions and do corrections. On the whole, there were few instances in the Facebook exchanges between students that revealed problems in understanding. More importantly, the tasks for the students in Facebook did not have a particular grammatical focus but rather aimed at providing students with meaningful and creative opportunities to communicate with each other about themselves outside the classroom.

Finally, Facebook developed a community of learners, who learned about each other in ways that may not have otherwise occurred. Frequent users of Facebook are familiar with its proclivity to quickly and simultaneously connect and network members with friends, family and colleagues from around the world. It was namely Facebook’s networking aspects that hopefully helped the students to change their perception of language learning from that of an individual activity to that of a more dynamic group activity.

If you’re not familiar with the difference between the two products, TurningPoint provides plug-ins for Microsoft Office to let you insert questions into your documents, but it only works with MS Office 2004 for Mac.  The TurningPointAnywhere software gives you a response indicator that “floats” on your desktop and isn’t linked to any software, so you can use it with questions in any format, including questions written on the chalkboard.  The short video tutorials are available at http://www.turningtechnologies.com/audienceresponsecommunity/tutorials.cfm

The live training also sounds very promising, and I plan to attend a couple of them in the next two weeks to see how they are.  I’ve attended live online training from TurningTechnologies in the past, and it was always very good.  The schedule and registration links are available at http://www.turningtechnologies.com/audienceresponsecommunity/onlinetraining.cfm

These new support offerings will be a nice complement to the short training videos that we have posted at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/clickers/resources  

I have to wonder if TurningTechnologies got the idea from us, because I showed our sales rep our videos about a year ago, and she thought they were a great idea.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in this case, a form that is helpful to our users, too!

Privacy of student information is a complex topic. Technical, pedagogical, cultural and legal factors will all impact how your students share their work in public forums. Educause published a very helpful guide on one type of public web assignment – student blogging. See http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI8006.pdf

What follows is a very brief overview of some issues you should consider when planning assignments. I’ll be working with privacy experts and other instructional support staff at Penn to provide more detailed guidance in the future.

Be clear about activities and goals. Students are usually enthusiastic about the opportunity to publish their course work on open web sites. They welcome the opportunity to have their work contribute to the community or advance scholarship in their field. Make it clear to your students from the outset what aspects of their work will be posted publicly, and why. Discuss issues of appropriate content and ask your students to let you know if they have concerns about posting their work publicly. If at all possible, review the plan for these activities at the start of the term so students will know what to expect and can decide if they want to continue with the course.

Offer alternatives. Your students have the legal right to control how their academic work is shared. If students express concerns about the privacy of their work, be prepared to offer alternative ways for them to complete the course requirements.

Avoid discussing sensitive personal information. Avoid activities which might lead students to disclose sensitive personal information about themselves or others. Caution them not to post information which could lead to identity theft (home address, date of birth, etc.) or compromise the privacy of their family, friends or classmates. This is especially important when medical or psychological history may be involved. If you have an activity that might lead students to disclose personal information, plan to conduct those activities using Blackboard or other systems provided by your school which will restrict access to students enrolled in the course.

Protect the identityof individual contributors. It may be possible for students to include their work in a course site without publicly disclosing personal identifying information. For example, you may have students composing the contents of a web site in a wiki on Blackboard or another protected system. The wiki will allow you to see and evaluate individual contributions, then export the final draft to a web-ready format which won’t reveal who contributed what. In other cases, you can have your students post to blogs or other forums using pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

Get permission from people who appear in photos or recordings. If your students will be posting pictures or audio/video recordings to publicly viewable sites, they need to get permission from the people who are seen or heard in those pictures or recordings. This is especially important when dealing with telling personal stories or commenting on controversial issues.

Respect copyright and provide citations. Appropriate use of copyrighted material in educational activities is a very complex subject in its own right. If you’re planning activities in which students might want to re-purpose copyrighted materials you need to become familiar with the principals of “fair use” and review those guidelines with your students. Of course, the usual rules about citation for academic work also apply to work posted on the web.

Encourage students to save their work. Commercial services such as Blogger, Wikipedia, Google Sites and others offer great functionality and convenience. But you and your students have little control over what will happen to these sites over time. Whenever possible, students should save personal copies of the materials they post to these sites. This can help protect against possible loss and assure that they will continue to have access to their own intellectual work products.

I encourage instructors of courses in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences to contact me if they have questions about issues concerning privacy of student work, or if they are planning assignments in which students will post their work to publicly viewable web sites.

Instructors at other schools should contact their instructional technology support providers, or school privacy officer.

-John MacDermott

SAS Computing

The tutorial on “Creating Enhanced Podcasts of Your Research” at http://www.apple.com/science/productivitylab/ is a prime example of this.  More than just showing you how to publicize your research, it provides 10 minutes of detailed instructions on how to create an enhanced podcast.  I could envision this being used in any number of ways in education - from instructors creating such podcasts to deliver mini-lectures that are available to their students on demand, to instructors using this tutorial as a tool when assigning students a project where they create the enhanced podcast.  The students’ podcasts could take their classmates through the details or concordant material related to a text or historical event, or could describe a scientific experiment or debate in history or even in the current journals.  The possibilities seem endless, and we’d be happy to work with any instructors who are interested in pursuing this.

If you know of other good tutorials like this one, please share them via the comments!

At today’s Distributed Learning Roundtable (April 23rd), Doug Lynch*, Lou Metzger*, and Amit Das* gave a presentation on their experience with incorporating film into distributed learning and the moral of the story happened to be an emphasis on story and design.  Doug Lynch wanted a clever way to get executives in his programs to learn how to interact with technology without being blinded by the hype often associated with it.  They chose to teach the executives how to make short educational films to prove the point that simply knowing how to use the technology doesn’t ensure a spectacular and engaging final product.  Using technology for educational purposes is more about design — it’s all about the story and the process.

Professor Amit Das was tasked with teaching the executives how to make *good* movies – meaning movies that detail a learning objective in an engaging and purposeful way.  Lou Metzger was tasked with selecting technologies that would be accessible and easy to use.  Using the inexpensive and user-friendly Flip camera paired with iMovie and Windows moviemaker (the default movie makers on Macs and PCs), Amit took the executives through several cycles of shooting, editing, and posting to get them comfortable with the technology in a traditional classroom face to face setting.  Later using Adobe Connect and Captivate online, Amit taught the executives the importance of things like story/scripting, camera angle, sound, and lighting.

At the beginning of these classes, Amit said that no one had a solid understanding of what a story was - he had to explain the importance of having a likable character who goes through some kind of conflict or struggle to receive a payoff of some sort (a “happy” ending).  He reported that engagement is all about emotion and emotion can really be evoked through story.  By the end of the classes, the executives were producing thought-provoking and emotion-evoking stories with the technology.

Doug, Lou, and Amit all did a wonderful job of conveying their experiences to the audience - and thank you to Karen Asenavage for organizing the Distributed Learning Roundtables!  I’ll have more blogs about those in the future.

I want to end with some of Daniel Pink’s thoughts on story and design, because I think they are important elements of any type of work we do in life … but they have a particularly strong relevance to teaching.  From the beginning of when I started this blog, design and story have been recurring elements in any kind of learning technology.

Excerpts from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind (2005):
Design is a high-concept aptitude that is difficult to outsource or automate — and that increasingly confers a competitive advantage in business.  Good design, now more accessible and affordable than ever, also offers us a chance to bring pleasure, meaning, and beauty to our lives.  But most important, cultivating a design sensibility can make our small planet a better place for us all.  “To be a designer is to be an agent of change,” says CHAD’s Barbara Chandler Allen (Pink 86).

We are our stories.  We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves.  That has always been true.  But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.

More than a means to sell a house or even to deepen a doctor’s compassion, story represents a pathway to understanding that doesn’t run through the left side of the brain.  We can see this yearning for self-knowledge through stories in many places — in the astonishingly popular “scrapbooking” movement, where people assemble the artifacts of their lives into a narrative that tells the world, and maybe themselves, who they are and what they’re about, and in the surging popularity of genealogy as millions search the Web to piece together their family histories.

What these efforts reveal is a hunger for what stories can provide — context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters.  The Conceptual Age can remind us what has always been true but rarely acted upon — that we must listen to each others’ stories and that we are each the authors of our own lives (Pink 115).

*Doug Lynch, Vice Dean GSE and Academic Director Wharton Executive Education
*Amit Das, Executive Director GSE Executive Education and former Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts and former director of film, video, and television program at NYU.
*Lou Metzger, IT Technical Director of Executive Educatiom

First, Anu Vedantham and Peter Decherney represented Penn admirably with their presentation “Mashup Video Projects for Classroom Creativity”  This ties in with Anu’s most recent post here about the Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards, but the presentation also covered ideas and tips for how to incorporate mashup video projects into courses not directly related to film.  Peter also generated a lot of interest with his part of this well-attended presentation, discussing copyright and related issues in mashups.  I encourage you to check the link above for more information about this great presentation.

The other session that I thought provided a lot of information that would be of interest to readers of this blog was the one titled “Your Video Projects Suck, but That’s OK ’cause So Do Your Papers: Moderating Student Expectations When Teaching New Media” by Jared Bendis of Case Western Reserve.  Anyone who has ever been to an NMC event knows that Jared is always a popular speaker, and this was no exception.  But this time he had a lot of practical tips for instructors who are assigning video projects to students who have never done any such thing before.  Of course he recommended the usual things like having several smaller “due dates” for storyboards, etc. before the completed project is due.  But he also pointed out that the “type A personalities” often end up with incomplete masterpieces, while the “slackers” set realistic expectations and often get the assignment finished with respectable work.  He also had a very interesting perspective on getting signed releases:  everyone must sign a release, including people who appear in a video and the student making the video, because the university has no control over where the video might be posted or shared after it’s submitted.

You can see the rest of Jared’s tips and some good sample videos of what to do and what not to do at http://fc.case.edu/newmedia/video/  The release form that he uses is linked in the middle of that page.

Also, a video of each session will be posted at http://www.nmc.org/2009-nml-symposium/program by March 30th if you’d like to watch it.

Now a word about SecondLife:  I had played with SecondLife briefly, but this was the first time that I ever attended a scheduled event, or even spent more than 10 minutes at a time in this virtual world.  The software has definitely become more stable since I last used it a year ago, but I did have it crash once, when I was attending a session where a video was being shown on a “screen” in SL.  And I use a computer that’s less than a year old and has a lot of RAM.  Other than that, I had a very positive experience.  I admit that I was a skeptic going in, but that’s why I wanted to register for this conference.  And it really was more engaging to watch an avatar on the screen give a talk, and be able to move around the room or change views, than it is to watch a ‘talking head’ in a rectangle of video for the same amount of time.  And I only embarrassed myself once, when I arrived at the “room” and had my avatar sit in what appeared to be an empty seat - but it turned out that the video world hadn’t fully loaded on my screen, and I was sitting on someone’s lap!  But the person was gracious, we both had a good laugh, and I ‘met’ someone I might not have.  

So that’s my report ‘from the field’.  Please let me know if I can answer any questions about it.

Stanford Cell Phone Quintet

Weigle Information Commons has just announced the 2009 Seltzer Awards competition. We expect to award $1,000 worth of equipment to five Penn undergraduates for one year for a new media project.

The announcement reminded me of the six ambitious and creative projects funded last year. One, by Nick Salvatore, introduced me to 3Dvideo - something I am eager to experience firsthand. Another, by Shawn Wang, proposed Second Life for international student-to-student exchanges. Kristin Hall proposed a video documentary about Botswana, Jody Pollock proposed a video documentary about Guatemala and Jean Lee proposed a video documentary set here in Philadelphia. And George Karandinos proposed an audio recording database. We hope to announce this year’s winners and showcase last year’s projects in mid-April.

In just a year, the technology has certainly sped up. I expect more applications for mobile, handheld projects - maybe one on cellphone music like this recent exploration at Stanford. And Second Life is getting more attention at Penn lately, especially from language lecturers.