Emerging Technologies Consulting

Planet Money, the fabulous economics podcast put on by NPR, had an episode last week showing how one teacher is using their podcast to build a curriculum for her economics class.  Included in the post are the lesson plans and links to the podcasts around which those plans are built.  What a great idea!

Google has launched Wave, a new social media tool that’s supposed to be a game changer in private beta.  While I’m waiting for my invite (pick me, please!), I decided to have a look at their slightly older release, Sidewiki. I must say, it’s pretty cool.  By adding a simple toolbar, which takes one click, you can add comments to any web site, which show up alongside the site.  Further, you can post those same comments to Twitter, to your blog, to Facebook, and more.  If a site has comments, you can see them by clicking the little text balloon and voila! find out what others are thinking. Some people have suggested that this usurps commenting on blogs or fractures that conversation, and that may be true, but for sites without comments, it offers a really easy way to make comments.  I can imagine lots of educational uses, too.  For example, students might be required to comment on a site for class and sidewiki provides easy tools for that comment to be shared, even via email.  There are tools that already do this, like Diigo, but with many schools already usuing Google’s apps, this offers better integration with that toolset.

Michael Clarke has argued at The Scholarly Kitchen, that sidewiki means institutions will no longer have control over their message.  I think that’s long been true, with blogs and Twitter and other media.  But it is true that there’s potential for someone to see what others think right from your site rather than through a Google search that lands them on a disgruntled employee’s blog. Now the disgruntled employee’s comments might appear side-by-side with your slick marketing campaign.  Prof Hacker has a good write up and some interesting comments about how good or bad the tool is.

The whole concept is nothing super new, but whenever Google starts doing something, it often becomes mainstream.  Whether it’s sidewiki or Diigo or something else, I think the idea of being able to comment on websites and share those comments widely is here to stay.

Technorati Tags: googlewave, sidewiki, education, technology

Mike Bogle argues that social media creates a better environment for learning than a Learning Management System does.  He goes through each learning goal set by his university and examines which set of tools does a better job at meeting those goals, and each time social media wins.  Mostly, I agree with him.  I do think that social media does a better job of encouraging reflection, collaboration, and personal responsibility for learning than most LMS’s do.  What I think the issue is is the default settings for each set of tools.  I’ve seen faculty create great environments for learning within course management systems, but it’s taken a lot of work and it often requires doing some serious outside the box thinking.  And it still has the drawback of not being open.  On the flip side, I’ve seen faculty do a blog “all wrong.”  They’ve worked hard to recreate a closed, non-interactive environment that’s on a blog instead of within an LMS.  In both cases, they’ve worked against the default.  The thing that I like about starting with social media is how stripped down it is and how it forces faculty to think pretty hard about the environment they want to create.  They may have to use different tools and connect them together using RSS or embedding it within a blog or wiki or other tool.  In an LMS, you can forgo thinking about the environment too much. First, there’s a default that looks familiar–a place for documents, a place for grades, a roster, etc.  Second, there’s little one can do to change the look and feel of the site, so that one often feels trapped.  You can add a discussion board, but you can’t change what it looks like or how it’s laid out.  Often the course exists within a frame where the school’s chosen banner and colors show up, overpowering any customization one might do. If a faculty member feels like they don’t have control over the site, imagine how students must feel.

The default for social media can usually be changed quite readily.  There are themes for blogs, changing its look to fit with the theme of the class or lay it out in a way that facilitates student work and learning.  Widgets that can incorporate Twitter feeds, video feeds or del.ici.ous links can be easily added.  There’s also the larger option of having a class site versus having each individual student set up their own site.  Either way, it’s easy to get student input and/or let students be responsible for what gets included and what tools will benefit them in their learning.  Links to wikis or other tools can easily be added to the site.  Learning needs to be flexible and the learning context needs to responsive to student needs.  It seems to me that social media offers that flexibility and responsiveness in a way that LMS’s just don’t.

It’s interesting to see so many articles discussing the pros and cons of online education.  The economy seems to have pushed people into thinking about what online education is, and what it might mean for higher education as an industry.  This article from the Washington Monthly looks at one approach that separates classes from time, so that a person can take as many classes as they can manage, one after the other without having to wait for a semester to begin.  The article does a good job of forcing us to look critically at how colleges have done business in the past and how that might now be seriously outdated or at least not meeting the needs of a segment of the population.  And yet, it acknowledges that traditional colleges do provide some benefits to its immediate community and society at large, and that shifting to online only might threaten some of those community goods, such as research and cultural contributions.

Since it’s my chosen career to help institutions and individuals use technology in teaching and learning, I obviously think technology has an important role to play in education, but I usually think of technology as an augmentation of a face-to-face class rather than as a complete substitution.  I do think it’s very possible to have an effective course that is fully online, but I don’t think these kinds of courses will ever completely replace the face-to-face college experience.  Chris Dawson writes today about online education killing the university.  He’s riffing off an article from the Washington Post about the same idea.  Believe me, I’d like to see the internet change a lot about the way we do education, but I also think we need to consider what else students learn when they go to college other than calculus or literature.  As I suggested in a comment to Chris’s post, going to a college like Harvard or Yale is about meeting people who may be able to help forward your career.  I made this argument on my personal blog earlier this summer:

One key reason people want to go to expensive schools, of course, are all the intangible benefits: the connections you make, the name recognition, etc. I agree that the cost seems way out of sync, but it also gets you some tangible benefits as well. At an exclusive SLAC, you won’t have a class larger than 40 or 50 people (and those are the lecture classes). Most classes will have 15 or so people. That means your opportunities for engaging in class discussion, for the teacher knowing you and keeping an eye on your progress are vastly increased. Your faculty will be from “better” schools (they cost more as a result, though their pay is still less than other professionals). The faculty will also be more available for one-on-one consultation and in theory, will also be more focused on teaching and learning rather than research (though this is debatable). Even at schools like Harvard and Yale, one could argue that having the opportunity to work with the great minds of our time is a privilege worth paying for.

There’s also a lot of learning that happens between classes, a point made back in the 70s by William Perry in his landmark study of Harvard students, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme.  I have argued for using blogs, wikis, and other online tools to enhance and expand that learning even in face-to-face classes.  While I think that it’s possible to create the kind of community and environment in which this kind of informal learning and development can happen strictly online, I think that it takes a certain kind of student to do that, and it would take a lot of work on someone’s part to make that happen (the faculty member, usually).  Virtual worlds like Second Life show promise in helping to do this.  There’s just something about seeing a representation of people.  But we are a long way from virtual world learning being mainstream.

I do think there’s a market for a get in and get out kind of online course.  Heck, there are some courses I’d like to take like that rather than spending a whole semester online or offline trudging through material.  But I still there’s a value for being physically present on a campus at least for part of one’s college life.  Human connection is still important to learning and not all that connection is possible via the Internet.  As someone who’s shifted to working at home and having the Internet as my main way of connecting to people, I can tell you that I miss the face-to-face life of the office at times.  I do hope that the existence of online courses and social software more generally causes universities to think differently about how they teach and how they organize curriculum, but that doesn’t have to be strictly by putting courses online.  Collaboration, multimedia literacy, writing for an audience, finding research, critical thinking are all things that can be enhanced by considering what’s going on on the Internet, whether one chooses to use technological tools to explore these ideas or not.  I hope that universities will take up those and more topics.  I hope that universities change, not disappear.

You might think it’s weird for an education blog to post about a game for the Nintendo DS, but I think this game and its ilk are things that kids can really learn from.  First, the game requires kids to come up with creative solutions, typing in things that might work for any given objective.  For example, to cross a river, one could build a bridge or a ramp and a motorcycle to jump over it.  It’s not as scripted as similar games might be. What seems more interesting to me as an educator is the ability to write your own game.  There is a simple scripting language kids can use to build their own levels.  From that, they learn the logic needed to excel at things like programming or even transportation management and they have the ability to be creative.  Increasingly, I think that’s where the best learning happens and where teaching should be focused, on that intersection between the creative and the logical, much like writing a sonnet.

Today on College 2.0, I noticed a link to a post about the costs of Moodle, an open-source course management system.  Now, I’ve always said that open-source doesn’t always mean free, but I do think in most cases, the costs can be less than those of a proprietary system like Blackboard.  Using my own experience working with Blackboard for six years, let me rebut some of the costs raised by the post.

Initial install and setup: The claim is that at least one person would be needed to install and setup Moodle.  This is true for Blackboard as well.  Most schools have at least one if not two people devoted to the back end work involved with managing Blackboard.

Site branding: Not even possible with Blackboard really.  In most cases, the person doing the backend stuff may also be able to do the site branding for Moodle, adding nothing to your costs.

Customization: Not even possible with Blackboard beyond adding building blocks, many of which cost extra.  Again, this work is probably going to be handled by the sys admin you hired to install and set everything up.

Hosting: Most people I know host Moodle or Blackboard on site, so much of the costs are in hardware and to some extent, bandwidth costs which can’t always be separated from general bandwidth costs.  In any case, these costs are going to be the same if done on site.  Going off-site might cost more or less, but I know many companies out there offering plain old hosting at a reasonable cost.  In fact, this site, using Bluehost, costs me about $5/month and I can install Moodle here if I want at no extra cost.  In addition, there are companies offering hosting of Moodle and much of the backend support for it.  You can’t say that about Blackboard.  As far as I can tell, only Blackboard offers managed hosting for their application, meaning there’s no competition for their services.

Training: In the post, they’re thinking specifically of training the tech people, but there’s also training of the faculty and students to be considered.  Blackboard offers a good deal of online resources, but so does Moodle.  In addition, my experience has been that getting a response to a question from Blackboard was quite difficult while getting a response from the Moodle community, even for very technical questions, takes no time at all.  I think the costs here will be in a person who serves as the trainer for the CMS, whether it’s Moodle or Blackboard and Professional Development for both the tech people and the trainer.  Often this means going to conferences to share knowledge.  Generally places budget between $1000 and $1500 per year per person, so let’s say this costs $3k.

Additional Software: The post talks about SQL as and “extra cost.” For one, the software is free and two, many, many places already used it.  And second, it’s likely that the person installing Moodle (or Blackboard or whatever) will be managing web software also.  And, Blackboard costs between $50k and $200k/year, according to many figures I’ve seen.  It’s priced according to enrollments so that a small school pays less than a large school.

Overall Site Upgrades: Okay, upgrades need to happen.  Again, if the person you hire to manage this stuff is responsible for everything to do with your install, then you’re adding no real costs here.  It’s only if you parcel it out to contractors or other IT people that there will be costs involved.

Authentication: This was a huge headache for us with Blackboard.  It was less of a headache with Wordpress, which makes me think that it would be less of a headache with Moodle

Communities and social networking components: I actually think that most CMS’s are bad at this.  But, most community and social tools have RSS feeds, which can be pulled into just about any CMS, including Blackboard.

So, I think the overall cost of an open-source system per year, hosting it yourself, might be $150k, a portion of which would be an initial layout for hardware for the server.  That’s 2 people @ $50k and $70k, plus some professional development.  Yearly costs would then be around $120k.  So over five years, assuming a replacement of the hardware at the 5-year mark, you might pay close to $700k.  With Blackboard, you’d pay that plus the annual fee, which averages $70k/year,  you’re well over a million dollars.

Storybird is a great little site that shows off some wonderful art that can be used to create a story (or you can upload art if that’s your thing).  Most of the art is somewhat kid-oriented, but not all.  I would think it would be a fun site to try out with kids, who often have stories, but no pictures.  And, it could be just a fun thing for anyone to do.

In the New York Times today, Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, worries out loud about higher education becoming too practical, focusing on providing a workforce rather than also focusing on research and on providing a broad liberal arts education to its students.  While I agree with much of what she says, that universities can and should be places where discoveries are made and where students can be exposed to many different subjects, it seems to me that she is a bit myopic herself.  First, not every institution of higher learning should be a place where discoveries are made.  Too many schools try to be like Harvard and require their faculty to do similar kinds of research with much less time and fewer resources.  I do think original research has a place even in a teaching-focused school, but in many of those places the tenure requirements don’t reflect the teaching focus, instead following a research-oriented pattern.  Any kind of school can focus on “the big questions” with or without research.  Second, not all research is created equal.  While I definitely think the humanities (it’s my field after all) is truly important to a college education, I don’t think that we need 20 more books on Shakespeare (or almost any other author).  We might need more funding for exploring how to teach the humanities or how the humanities can inform the sciences, etc.  In other words, in fields where we might not be making new discoveries, we might get creative about what counts as research instead of doing the kind of research that people have been doing for 50 years.

As for having curricula that encourage students to focus early and not take a broad view of life, I agree that this happens too often.  I’ve been in institutions where students declare a major before they arrive and advisers put them on a course where they barely look at a literature class (or a science class if they’re humanities majors).  There are a couple of things that I think might help here.  Changing the curriculum to require courses that look at broader issues, that include courses in philosophy or history or literature, is one way to alleviate this.  And I’d suggest not allowing students to “get those out of the way.”  Taken later in their college career, as students become more mature, might make these classes more meaningful.  Offer classes that appeal across disciplines.  The Gender and Technology class that I co-taught in the spring is one such example.  It’s a good thing for computer science students to think about gender and it’s a good thing for art history students to think about technology (and many of them said so in their final evaluations).  When planning courses, chairs could think about what courses in other disciplines might benefit their students.  Ethics for business majors (and CS majors, too.).  The chemistry of art. The art of physics. Having conversations with colleagues in other departments about their course offerings might lead to some creative ideas, even co-teaching opportunities.

I agree with Faust that economic pressures often cause us to put blinders on and think narrowly about jobs.  But most employers, even now, are still saying that what they need are creative people who have the ability to think critically and learn new things.  Any narrow focus, whether it’s on literature or business, can prevent more creative and thoughtful approaches.  Instead of hitting the panic button and generating more business majors to make money, colleges should seriously consider their own purpose (not Harvard’s or Yale’s), and consider how they can make the most out of their faculty and students.

Yesterday, I started to write some of my thoughts about what the impact on colleges of the current economic climate might be.  I realized that aside from knowing about furloughs and layoffs and salary freezes, I didn’t know much about it.  That is, until this article from the San Francisco Gate.  There are fewer instructors and therefore fewer classes, so the classes are either much larger or students are taking things they hadn’t intended to take–a boon for Latin as one teacher said.  Some students have decided to postpone college altogether.  Many colleges did not limit enrollments despite having fewer teachers in place, since higher enrollments does mean some increased revenue.  But what kind of education is a student getting when they’re crammed into a classroom meant to hold 40 students with 50 or more students.  And what about those who are postponing either enrolling or graduating?  That’s going to cost them in the long run.  I know many colleges didn’t have a choice, but it strikes me that this could be more than just a short term problem.