Educause Top Learning Challenges: Engaged Learning

I’m at a session right now about Top Learning Challenges at Educause. Someone just read off this quotation which I have seen before.

Yet despite the tremendous investment that all institutions of higher education have made in information technology, despite the number of classrooms wired and the number of laptops mandated, the vast majority of classes proceed as they have for generations—isolated, even insulated, from the powerful technologies we use in the rest of our lives. Moreover, the form in which scholarship appears has barely changed. Across almost every field, researchers, no matter how sophisticated the technology they use in discovery, translate their discoveries into simple word-processed documents.

via The Academic Culture and the IT Culture: Their Effect on Teaching and Scholarship (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

I wanted to capture this here, because I think it does a good job of describing one of the main challenges of my job and my department at Wheaton. We need to help faculty and others at Wheaton explore this technology we’ve been investing in and the digital world that we are now all embedded in — so that we can discover or tap it’s potential for transforming teaching, learning and research.

Text Encoding

In honor of the Text Encoding Workshops that I helped organize at Wheaton the weekend before last, I present a Bob Dylan TEI mashup. (Never thought I would say those words.)

Thanks to Chris Hyde in my department for finding that one.

The Workshops themselves were great. I am hoping we can get some good collaborative projects going with Mount Holyoke, Dickinson College, and NITLE around publishing the documents we are creating. Hopefully more on this soon!

Tech N Talk Schedule

I’ve blogged a couple times about Tech N Talks. In case you’re interested, here’s the full schedule along with the description that I sent out at the beginning of the semester to our faculty listserv:

Tech ‘N’ Talk Tuesdays:
12:30 – 1:30, the Faculty Lounge in Emerson
The Research and Instruction Department of LIS presents a series of brown bag lunchtime conversations about technology’s intersection with teaching and research. What does it mean to teach in an environment saturated with mobile devices and wireless Internet? How could sites like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter help or hinder your teaching? Can you use digital maps to do more than just lookup directions? Is the digital age changing the way we engage in scholarship? Each Tuesday, faculty, library liaisons, and technology liaisons will meet in the Faculty Lounge at 12:30 to grapple with these and many more questions — a new topic each week. Please join us!

Schedule:

September 9th: iPhone Comes to School: Mobile Computing in the Classroom , Presenter: Scott Hamlin
September 16th: Getting your Voice Out There: Podcasting for teaching, research and class projects – Presenters: Michael Drout, Leah Niederstadt
September 23rd: Mapping your Research: GoogleEarth and GIS – Presenters: Domingo Ledezma
September 30th: Wheaton on YouTube? Making Video Lectures – Presenters: Tim Barker, John Partridge

October 7th: Facebook and Social Software  –  Presenter(s): Paula Krebs (faculty), Alex Friberg (student)
October 21st: Technology’s Role in Collaborative Writing – Presenter: Lisa Lebduska
October 28th: Teaching with Digital Images – Presenter(s): Touba Flemming and TBA

November 4th: Wheaton onCourse: a Pilot Exploring an Alternative to Blackboard – Presenter(s): TBA
November 11th: Keeping Current with the Literature: RSS & Alerts – Presenters: Mason Brown and Patrick Rashleigh
November 18th: Digital Humanities: New Approaches to Scholarship – Presenters: Kirk Anderson, Kathryn Tomasek

December 2nd: Managing your Citations: Refworks and Beyond – Presenter(s): TBA

Video Lecturettes

Last Tuesday we had a Tech N Talk brown bag discussion on video lectures… or rather a version of video lectures that two professors have been experimenting with in their classes. This is not the typical set a camera up at the back of a classroom, tape a full class lecture, and then post it somewhere (like iTunes U — which we don’t have… yet). Instead, Tim Barker (Astronomy) and John Partridge (Philosophy) are creating short videos to supplement their classes… not video lectures… something smaller. Lecturettes?

Barker often thinks of content after the class is over that would help his students, sometimes information that he would like them to have before the class meets again or that would help them complete an assignment. So, rather than typing it out in an email, he decided to try creating video messages for his class. He hooks a web cam up to his Windows-based laptop and places it in front of a chalk board in his office, and then records. The software he uses (I need to check with him… I think it came with the camera he purchased) was cheap, fast, easy to use and had an “upload to YouTube” button built in. So, he was able to post his material and get it out to his students quickly.

Partridge used his Macbook, a USB microphone, and iMovie for the first time last semester to record four short supplemental lectures for student. The first one was an introduction to materials on his Blackboard site, and his others contained background information to materials his students were reading and discussing in class. He posted his “vodcasts” to the Blackboard forums for his students to view between classes. This was material he would have had to cover at some point and by having it in video form, he was able to win back some class time for discussion (as opposed to solid lecture).

Both professors’ work demonstrates how far the technology has come over the past few years. Barker said he tried something similar several years ago and was frustrated with how much work it took. Partridge discovered how easy it was to do after posting videos of his kid up on YouTube for his relatives. Both faculty members needed very little support — a fact that amazes me, because it used to be that you needed to work in a video lab or at least on a souped up machine to create digital video.

While making the videos and posting them was relatively easy, I don’t think that either professor was happy with where they ended up publishing them. Barker put his on YouTube, because it was easy to do. But he really only wanted his students to see it, and therefore didn’t take advantage of any of the social features there — nor did he want to. What’s funny is that YouTube forces you to be social anyway, by posting “related videos.” Since Barker’s work was not labeled in a meaningful way and he didn’t password protect it, he had some strange “related” things (and “things” is a good description of them) in his side bar. Patridge discovered that Blackboard (at least our basic version of it) was a little clunky for video, and we Academic Technology folks are a little concerned about videos taking up too much space on that server. So, the search for where to put our digital stuff goes on. Perhaps Moodle (which we are piloting this semester) has a plugin? Perhaps iTunes U? We’d better start searching…

When is it “good enough”?

We had the third Tech N Talk Tuesday brownbag lunch this week. It’s part of a series; each week over this semester (and maybe next if this is successful), we host lunchtime conversations about technology’s intersection with teaching and research. We cover a different topic every week. The first was on Mobile Devices in the classroom. The second was on Podcasting (with two faculty presenters: Leah Niederstadt and Michael Drout).

This week we discussed a class project by Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, Domingo Ledezma. Faculty Technology Liaison, Jenni Lund, helped him out with the project. Ledezma’s students worked with primary sources — 16th century Spanish texts about the exploration of the “New World” — and digital images of maps from the period. Using the book as a source, they worked with Google Earth to map out part of one of Magellan’s voyages and attached text (in Spanish that they wrote) and images (primarily cropped segments of maps from the period) to points along his journey. The images were created by students cropping digital versions of old maps and uploading them to Flickr. (I’ll find the link to the Flickr account and post it here soon.) Great stuff!

Some good questions were raised by Ledezma’s talk: These types of projects are a great way to get students interested in and grappling with the texts, he told us, and so they function as great pedagogical tools. The process of creating this interactive map in GoogleEarth helps them learn more about the text — much in the same way researching and writing papers helps them learn about a topic. But what happens to these projects when the class is over?

One faculty member wanted to know where we store them and make them available for others to see. Sure, we can put them up on the web, but multimedia projects like this that are pulling from multiple sources — a kml file, Flickr — and which use GoogleEarth for display are not like an academic paper that fits well into… say… DSpace. And there’s no guarantee that a project like this will last into the future. Will GoogleEarth and Flickr always be around? Will we be able to view these maps ten years from now? At the rate technological changes are moving, what about 1 or 2 years from now?

Ledezma and others followed up with questions about trying to show others this work. Is it ready to just post somewhere after the class is over? Given that class projects are… well class projects, it would seem that a certain about copyediting and fact checking needs to happen before it is put out there for all to see. But who does that work? We’ve hired students to do it in the past — but is that the right approach? And my big question: how much of this kind of work really needs to be done before we can post it?

I have worked on a lot of projects that we planned on getting up on the Web to share with others, but that we held off on posting because we wanted to make sure it was right before we did. More recently, I have been thinking that you have to decide ahead of time that there comes a point when a project is “good enough.” After a while, you have to stop tinkering and just get it up there. The trickier part is finding that sweet spot — the point in the project where the thing you put out there isn’t too chocked full of errors, but that isn’t too long after when the project started or the class ended.

Someone attending the talk rightly noted that the point of these projects isn’t so much the product anyway — that it’s the process. The process helped those old texts come alive for students. The process made students more engaged. If that’s the case, maybe we should just post them right away. Or maybe not at all? I don’t know… on the one hand, it would be a shame to hide all of that good work, but on the other, I’m not sure the perfectionist in me would want to get stuff out there that was too rough. I’m thinking my new mantra might need to be, “there comes a time when it’s good enough.” I just wish I could find a way to know when it was that time.

It’s ironic that that I should be ending on this note and that this theme is the title of this blog post. You see, I started writing this on Tuesday and have been coming back to it on and off ever since. It seems I’ve got to have the same attitude about posting to my blog too. OK, Scott, time to post. This may not be perfect… but it’s a blog! And good enough.

Back to… Blorking?

Blorking? Is that what you’d call it? Blogging at work… Blogging about work. That’s what I mean. I still do blog with my wife and son for family and friends. Someone once described that blog as a “perpetual Christmas newsletter,” and I guess that’s kind of what it is. But I haven’t blogged about work for a while.

I started as an enthusiastic blogger, for work and otherwise. I think I had 4 or 5 weblogs going at one time when I first discovered social software five years ago. I had my aquarium blog where I meticulously logged setting up a new fish tank. (I know… geek, right?) I had a personal blog, which I didn’t publicize very much, and therefore no one read; it started on Blogger and then I moved it to WordPress.

At work, I had a Social Software blog, where a librarian and I linked to all that we thought was cool in Web 2.0 before it was even called that. (I remember writing a post titled something like “And the term of the year is…. Web 2.0″ a few months after starting the site.) I had blogs for projects that I was working on at Wheaton: TEI for Small Liberal Arts Colleges, Blackboard @ Wheaon, etc. I started a group blog with the other Faculty Technology Liaisons in my department called The Latest and Greatest and then a year or two later I moved it to a local server and called it “RNI: Ruminations and Notations on Information.” (Not a great name, I know. I was trying to play off of our department’s name: Research aNd Instruction.)

All of those blogs failed… or rather dribbled out. Only my family newsletter blog remains. As you can tell by the links I provided above, a few of them still stand as tombstones; I deleted others (usually when I got sick of getting email notifications of spam comments.) In each case, I felt too busy to write and/or was not motivated because I wasn’t writing for much of an audience.

So, why try again? I am no less busy than before, so maybe this blog is doomed to fail as well. But I have been twittering in two places — one account public, the other only for co-workers to see — and have found through the low-pressure highly social micro-blogging format that I could find the time to write at least a few things every day. And on occasion I have wanted to say more than the 140 characters would let me. This would give me that chance.

The other thing that happened — when I started in my new position, I decided to get more organized with how I “get things done.” I have been experimenting with all sort of Todo list apps to help me out. (For a while, I was using Remember the Milk, but recently when I got my iPhone, I settled on Toodledo.) And I now actively organize my notes from meetings on my laptop. I started with Journler, but decided that I would like to have access to those notes from any computer. So, I set up a private note-taking blog for myself using WordPress. In addition to recording factual notes (i.e. “this is what happened at this meeting”), I also find myself writing a few posts where I am actively trying to think about where we are headed as a department or where academic technology seems to be headed and what role Wheaton should play in that direction. It occurred to me that some of those thoughts could (maybe even should) be said outloud.

So, here goes. Another attempt. Maybe it’ll stick this time. We’ll see. Back to blorking!