Emerging Technologies Consulting

Julie Meloni, a longtime blog friend of mine, writes a post at my new favorite blog, Prof. Hacker, on integrating blogging into a course.  She offers great advice, with links to even more help, including examples of assignments and evaluation strategies.  Some people have assumed that using blogs is like making digital versions of short paper assignments.  It’s usually not.  And using a blog for that can be overkill.  I’ve mostly used blogs as a form of online class discussion, with the expectation that the discussions will be slightly more thoughtful (because students have had time to think) than what happens in the short amount of time in the classroom.  I look for interaction among the students and encourage that kind of interaction by counting comments in my evaluation.  Basically, what tends to happen is that some students quite readily come up with original content and enjoy posting it.  Others either have difficulty coming up with the ideas or have the ideas but are reluctant to post it.  These students often end up commenting on other students’ posts, often adding quite significantly to the discussion.  Just as in the blog world, there are more readers than writers, it’s okay to let this happen in a class blog too.  Because I see the blog as helping to build a class community, I’ve always opted for a group blog.  It’s easier as a teacher to keep up with.  I simply follow the feed and read material that’s interesting.  I tell my students that as well, so they know that they’re trying to attract my attention.

One thing Julie didn’t mention was the issue of making the blog public vs. private.  I have always made the blog public.  In fact, the first time I taught the course, the goal was to gain a readership for the blog.  The students got very creative about this and put posters around campus with the link, included the link in their IM away messages and email signatures.  We also encouraged them to read and link to other blogs and even to comment on them.  In other words, we wanted them to appreciate how the blogosphere really worked.  I think it’s important for students to feel like they’re writing for an audience besides the professor or even their fellow students.  They are often more careful in their writing and try to make better, more evidence-based arguments.  I can imagine, however, some situations where you’d want a private blog.  Now that the blogosphere is so huge, though, unless your students are doing the kind of legwork mine did, the likelihood of your blog attracting much attention.

Blogging with my classes has really made them quite memorable for me and I hope for my students, and it was interesting enough to me that I wrote my dissertation on it.  My first blog class is archived here.  The only other class that remains online is this past spring’s Gender and Technology course, which was a great course to teach.  I’d definitely say to anyone that bloggins is something worth trying with your class.

I’ve been working on a couple of presentations for the last few days.  The underlying theme of both of them is that people still fear the Internet.  My discussion of this theme with my husband led to some heated arguments.  He thinks that people, especially educators, don’t fear the Internet any more.  He claims they’re willing to use it for research and recognize that their students will too.  That may, in fact, be somewhat true.  I’m still skeptical that it is.  When it comes to social media, however, fear seems to still be the prevailing emotion.  People tout the idea that “stuff you put on the Internet is forever, and you should be very, very careful.”  I don’t disagree, but no one’s giving the other side, that putting good information about yourself online can lead to good things.  And yet, people still seem to think that there’s some kind of bogey man lurking behind the screen who’s going to get you.  If that’s true in higher education, it’s especially true in the K-12 environment.  Dean Shareski writes about participating in a panel on social networking at a local high school that left him feeling very disappointed.  While it’s important to educate students about online privacy and safety (though like Dean, I think very few kids are in any serious danger online), it’s equally important to talk to them about the positive side of social networking and social media.  I’m starting to see kids in college who’ve had this fear message pounded into their heads and in some ways, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.  Employers can’t find anything on them, good or bad, and so they get lost in the crowd.   Being required to use social media, like blogs, in a positive way, as part of their curriculum can benefit students much more than fear mongering can.  Take this comment from a student in my class:

I’ve been surprised at how useful just having some of my writing up on the internet can be. When I was applying for an internship that would involve writing for a blog (many of them do, now, it seems to me), I included a hyperlink for this blog in my cover letter in order to give the interviewer easy access to some writing samples, and it kicked off the conversation in the interview. A friend in this class said this blog came up in her interview, too. So I definitely agree that blogging can help us out in the future–and the future is now, I guess!

The future is now, for sure.  Social networking is not going to go away.  It may morph and change, but making it seem like the destruction of civilization as we know it doesn’t help our kids learn how to use it responsibly.  If they avoid it out of fear, they may miss out on important job and life opportunities.  Is that what we want?

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• Social media threats hyped by science reporting, not science – via @arstechnica (arstechnica.com)

Ars has a good story up detailing how stories like the Facebook one I mentioned earlier this week end up slanted the way they are. It would be good reading for any student to help them understand that what makes it to our newspapers and on news programs isn’t always completely accurate.  In this case, Ars points out that the Facebook story that claimed that students who used Facebook more had worse grades.  This is actually true, but it’s a correlation not a causation, something the first news story (which set the tone for many of the rest) did not emphasize.  So the story wasn’t inaccurate, but some sloppy reporting made the results appear different than they actually were.  Ars explains that often journalists (or their editors) will exaggerate or emphasize findings that are more sensational in order to grab readers.  Unlike science journals, newspapers and news shows are out to make money and that sometimes causes them to skew their reporting.  There are even more examples of this in areas outside of science–politics, crime, etc.

Ars points to several issues in science reporting that lead to this problem.  One is the embargo system, which does two things.  When a journalist breaks it, they get to set the tone and direction of the story, even if they have it wrong, as happened in the case of the Facebook story.  Two, it can mean that regular folks have no access to the real paper on which a story is based, so that the public could judge for itself how accurate the story is.  Another problem is the general reduction in staff for science reporting, leading non-specialists to do the reporting or leaving overworked journalists to work, perhaps less carefully, on all the science stories.  And a third problem is the press releases themselves.  Some are quite good and present research accurately.  Others are sometimes the source of the sensationalism (in an attempt to gain attention for the institution) rather than the newspaper or news program.  Scientists sometimes don’t give these reports the careful reading they should or sneak in implications that wouldn’t make it past peer review.  Ars says that readers should learn to be more skeptical, but also,

Scientists could stand to further develop the skills needed to communicate their work with people who aren’t part of the scientific community, and to ensure that these skills are made part of the graduate education program, so that the situation improves.

One way that scientists and readers alike can circumvent this problem is through blogs.  Scientists learn to communicate their work to a general public and/or comment on others’ work in a way that the public can understand and readers get an inside look at how science really works.  There are a few places to find these blogs.  The most popular is Scienceblogs.  I read quite a few of the blogs there and check in on many of them fairly frequently.  I’m not a scientist, but I’m interested in science and love the way that these bloggers make science understandable and also explain some of the work that goes into science.  Another place to go is the Academic Blog Portal’s science section.  There is some overlap here with Scienceblogs, but there’s some non Scienceblogs listed there as well.  Finally, if you want posts that specifically convey academic research for the layperson, go to Research Blogging where you’ll find academics writing about research so that the rest of us get it.  Finally, it’s worth searching blogs for more.  Google’s Blogsearch and Technorati are places to start.  You can put the exact link in usually and see who’s commenting on the story.  As I pointed out, a researcher whose blog I happened to read had debunked the Facebook story as it originally appeared.  There are enough academic bloggers out there that if you have suspicions about a science story, you can probably find someone who has analyzed the story from a scientists perspective.

On Friday, the World Wide Web turned 20.  I remember learning about the web.  In 1990, I had headed off to Indiana University for a Master’s program in Creative Writing.  One might not think that a writer would have any interest whatsoever in the web and the Internet, but I spent a lot of time on a computer, writing my poetry.  Also IU was on the cutting edge of Computer Science, so regular folks had access to technology that they might not have at a different institution.  I stood in line to get my email address, and I still use that same username across many of the social media I use today.  I participated in email lists and usenet news groups, and I have vague memories of using Gopher, but I really didn’t see a web browser until 1995.  That’s when my husband was looking for jobs in Computer Science.  So we spent time surfing the web, looking at potential schools.  We reasoned that a school with a web site in 1995 probably had a decent CS presence.

In those early days, the web was slow.  Most pages were text only, sad versions of print and graphically-enhanced brochures.  I can remember, however, shopping on the web in 1998 via eToys.  And I can remember being frustrated when I couldn’t shop and when businesses didn’t have their products online, just an address and contact info.  Blogs appeared around 1998 and from that point one, the web became a two-way street.  Some might argue that discussion forums, which existed before then, were a two-way street, but I would argue that the blog form encouraged sites like the New York Times and even corporate sites to allow commenting on articles and to get feedback and reviews that become part of the site, rather than being emailed into the black hole of some customer service address.  Amazon, of course, has taken this to an extreme.

I started building my own web sites in 1996.  I taught others how to do it in 1997 and onward.  I never became a web developer, per se.  I found the work tedious.  And as the web developed, it went beyond the HTML and CSS I used to build most of my web sites and moved into the realm of actual programming.  Once web sites became dynamic instead of static, they needed to be programmed rather than simply built.  Luckily, about that same time, blog software and other site building software matured so that a person could put up a web site (a dynamic web site even!) quite quickly, no experience in HTML or programming necessary.

The web used to be accessible only to those who knew about it, but quite quickly, it’s become completely mainstream and has completely changed over the course of 20 years.  If you want to give yourself a laugh, go visit the Internet Archive and look at some sites from the 90s.  They were kind of pathetic, but at the time, they were the cutting edge of web technology.  The next 20 years should be interesting as the web no longer just resides on computers, but also on phones, game consoles, and handheld games.  Who knows what it will look like in 20 years or from where we’ll be able to access it?  I’m looking forward to the developments.

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On Wednesday, I’ll be conducting a day-long workshop at Gettysburg College through NITLE’s wonderful programming.  In preparation for the workshop, I prepared the following resources.  There’s so much out there now on using different social software tools for teaching that it’s hard to keep the list short.  I just threw a few things in each category.  If you know of other resources I should include, let me know.

General–interesting things on Social Software in Education

• Michael Wesch from Academic Commons, Learning in New Media Environments (The whole issue is worth exploring)
• Clay Shirky on Tagging
• Mark Prensky (classic writing on digital natives, gaming, education, etc.)

Blogs

• Academic Blog Wiki
• Research Blogging
• Blog Software

Wiki Assignments

• Writing/Evaluation Assignment
• Wikipedia’s invitation to participate and ideas for assignments
• Wikiversity
• Educause: 7 Things You Should Know about Wikis
• Wikis in Plain English (video)

Social Bookmarking

• List of articles/resources on using social bookmarking

Images

• The Commons at Flickr
• FlickrVision

Social Networking

• Social Networking for Educators
• 25 Apps for Facebook for Educations

Gaming

• SLED
• Second Life vs. WoW for learning
• Language Learning in WoW