Emerging Technologies Consulting

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.

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.

I just spent the last hour listening to a presentation I gave with my colleagues, Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill. What most amazed me was the conversation that took place between the participants. They had some amazing things to say, good questions and good potential solutions. It makes me really appreciate the crowdsourcing we do for our presentations. Many minds are always better than one or three. I learned a lot, and more importantly, I think the participants learned more than they would have if they’d just heard from the three of us.  Check out the video, and if you have examples, we’d love to hear from you at our wiki. Links appreciated.

The blog inadvertantly went on hiatus thanks to a lovely trip to Monterey, CA for the New Media Consortium’s summer conference.  There, my colleagues Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill and myself presented on Fear 2.0.  We’ve been thinking about this for several years now and have presented various versions of it.  We’ve now turned the”presentation” entirely into a discussion format.  We began the conversation by asking participants to draw pictures of what the education system looks like to them.  So, we got images of ivory towers with people falling off and chipping away at it, of factories spitting out things, of funnels, and of crutches.  We then had a discussion around those images.  Because we wanted to move past the negative and on to the positive, we asked people to name a problem, either specific to their institution or related to education as a whole, and then the group was to propose solutions to it.  We ended up with a document listing the problems and proposed solutions.  The last item, the fear that higher ed will be irrelevant proposed by Bryan Alexander, came near the end and has very few bullets beneath it as proposed solutions.  But indeed, I think this is the fear that many of us in the room struggle with.  Sometimes that fear is directed toward a specific discipline and sometimes a specific institution, but I think there’s a general fear that higher ed might become a dinosaur, at least in its current form.  After contemplating that giant fear for a few minutes, we turned to thinking about an ideal form of education.  Most people came up with more collaborative models and of models that allow different ways of approaching learning.  It seems that we all felt that education now was a one-size-fits-all proposition and that wasn’t working for everyone, teacher and student alike.

Since we started talking about fear a couple of years ago, it’s morphed quite a bit.  People are no longer terrified of blogs and wikis and Twitter, but they’re anxious about them and skeptical of them.  I think many people understand that even if they don’t use any social media at all, social media has changed the landscape quite a bit.  People expect to connect, respond, interact.  They expect to have access to more information.  They expect a slightly faster pace to many things.  And that changes expectations for education.  People know this, but acting on that knowledge is hard.  There are structures in place that make it hard and even students, with their social networking prowess, come with industrial education style baggage that is hard to get rid of.  What we hope facing these anxieties does for people is allow them to take that first step to get past them or to help students or faculty get past them.  Healthy skepticism is fine; ignoring the new landscape leads to extinction.

Today collection of tools is of a much higher quality than anything I looked at last week.  I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t be able to find anything worthwhile out there.  But today we have an annotation tool, a huge collection of delicious (social bookmarking) tools, and Academic Earth, the educational video collection.

• A.nnotate is a prouduct that lets you upload documents in many different formats and put “stickies” on them.  Those documents can then be shared with others so that you can collaborate on projects with others.  There are a number of different pricing plans, including one specifically for academic institutions that also includes a way to integrate with Learning Management Systems.  They tout the ability to integrate with Moodle and also say they can integrate with other systems.  This will cost you a fair amount of money–around $3000 for unlimited usage–but it might save you your own server costs in some areas.  They also have a free version for individuals to use that looks like it will suit most peoples needs.  Although both Diigo and Google docs allow for some commenting and collaboration, this product allows multiple formats from pdfs to web pages and the notes are intuitive to make and read.  This definitely looks like a product worth investigating and I’m thinking it would be great for commenting on student work.  I’ve often used the comment feature in various word processors and although that works, there could be compatibility problems and it just feels a little clunky to me.
• Absolutely Delicious is really a web page with a list of links to a wide variety of delicious tools.  I’m a big fan of delicious so it’s nice to see a list of resources that can help me take advantage of that tool better.  There are tools that help you manage, retag, post, and search you bookmarks.  Some are web based and some are desktop tools.  There are also instructions for posting delicious links to your blog and simply how to get started using delicious.  I highly recommend adding *this* site to your bookmarks and try out some of the tools on the site.
• Academic Earth is a site I looked at and wrote a bit about before.  I really do like the look an feel of this site.  It’s uncluttered and very easy to navigate.  I had said earlier that compared to YouTube, the site had less material, but it’s definitely growing, and I think the way it’s organized by subject matter makes a lot of sense.  The YouTube EDU site is organized by school and many of the videos listed under the school are more promotional than educational.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, but if you’re looking for physics lectures, you’ll have to do a search.  Once you click a video, you’re out of the EDU portal and getting back isn’t easy.  While there are 691 videos on YouTube’s EDU site labelled physics compared to AE’s 4, I still think that AE is going to win out–at least it should.  While YouTube fell into being used for education, AE was built for it and there are features that make it a better tool for that reason.  In addition to the listing by topic or subject, there are also playlists organized by editors.  Those playlists include “Understanding the Economic Crisis” and “Wars Throughout History.”  I’m planning to use those with my kids–at least my high schooler–this summer.  There just seems to be more potential for building out an entire learning unit from AE lectures than from YouTube materials.

These are definitely must check out tools.  Let me know what you think of them or how you’re using them!

The two week gap in this blog was due in part to my participation in Faculty Academy at University of Mary Washington.  Webcasts of many of the presentations are slowly but surely going online.  I love when conferences do this, put videos of the presentations online after the fact.  Conferecnes are expensive ventures these days (though this one isn’t!), and with tight budgets, many people can’t attend, so it’s great to be able to see some of the material.  I’ve been able to do this for a number of conferences, including ELI, and it’s so important to me to be able to keep up with the latest discussions in the field. I highly recommend watching both of the webcasts that are up on the FA site.  James Boyle’s talk was about how the University needs to be more open, and the debate between Jim Groom and John St. Clair is about open web tools for courses vs. closed systems like Blackboard.  It’s entertaining and informative.

So, I’m going to wade in here, where I’m not wanted, to talk about the article by Mark Taylor, in the New York Times. I liked the article. I thought it made some really good points. But around the blogosphere, there’ve been some misgivings, not unwarranted misgivings, but misgivings. Not unsurprisingly, Marc Bousquet is concerned about the treatment of the faculty and argues that jobs exist for faculty, but the university has shifted its labor force to part-timers or non-tenured people already. If they just opened those jobs up for full-time t-t faculty, the world would be a better place. Here’s my take on that argument, as an adjunct myself. There are indeed some places that rely too heavily on adjunct labor, with 75% of their classes being taught by adjuncts, but this is not the case everywhere. At least part-time work is available at colleges and universities, unlike at corporations. Would I like for those jobs to come with some benefits? Yes. Would I like for the pay to be reasonable? Yes. One of the problems in the college and university labor force is that, while many people think tenure is holding back higher ed from change, no one has come up with a good, viable solution that protects the employees (academic freedom, bargaining rights, etc.). And there’s the problem of mobility (or lack thereof). I know I’ve said this before, but if a manager gets laid off from a job, she doesn’t have to move halfway across the country to get another one (usually). An English professor doesn’t have that option, especially in a small town. Somehow, we have to deal with this. Either faculty will need to just understand that the possibility exists that they’ll have to move (and doesn’t this exist anyway?), or perhaps they’ll consider it a freedom to be able to move to another university without having to give up the hard work they’ve put in toward tenure. In many cases, whatever structure one comes up with in terms of long-term contracts will probably mean informal tenure anyway, the difference being, perhaps, certain standards have to be met.

Dean Dad takes on the suggestion that departments be eliminated. He describes the administrative nightmare this would cause, and wonder who the hell would do all the work of developing the curriculum for these programs. I think he’s thinking it will be him. At the SLAC’s I’m familiar with, some of this interdisciplinary work is being done informally, either by individual faculty or by “centers” or programs. The course I’m currently teaching is cross-listed in 5 different departments and programs. We’ve read materials in sociology, computer science, literature, film theory, psychology, cultural studies, and philosophy, to name a few. We brought in guest speakers and the work the students were required to do involved both traditional papers, blog writing, and a multimedia project. And let me just say, the planning alone was a buttload of work. So I see where DD is coming from. But I also see what a fabulous learning experience this was for students. I could envision parallel systems here, where students are required to take courses that are interdisciplinary, but still have majors. And these courses could be centered around a common theme, so that there’s a common language for the students, but it would be good to have the math majors talking to the English majors.

Finally, although Tim Burke agrees with much of what Taylor proposes, the online collaboration bit seems suspect to him. I think that the idea is actually a good one. The problem is many schools do not have the infrastructure necessary to make this possible, even expensive schools like the SLAC’s in my area. I like the idea, however, of less specialization, of feeling the need to cover every niche of every discipline. Maybe there’s a faculty member at another school who teaches a niche that no one at our school does and technology could facilitate having that person teach some of our students. Granted, smaller scale tools like Skype and other web conferencing tools can be used in some cases. But would those work for a large class? How many support staff would you need to support this kind of work if, say, 25% of your courses are taught this way? How would the distant students get access to the materials? Would they need accounts on certain systems? Most schools are not using something like OpenID or even any kind of open tool where students can just sign up for their own accounts, so unless the course is on the open web, there’s some overhead there for getting students access to the course. And then there’s the administrative overhead of figuring out the curriculum or at least approving it. Around here, we have around 100 colleges within a 50-mile radius. There are clusters of collaborations already, both formal and informal among the schools that have similar missions and/or are close to each other. Could these collaborations be expanded? Yes. Can technology help? Yes, but IT departments would need to shift to a different model on the academic side to make this work. Lock-down mode doesn’t work when you’re trying to collaborate across institutions.

My own feeling about the article is that I do want something to change. I don’t know if the elimination of departments works, but what about merging departments? What about creating a real interdisciplinary infrastructure instead of just giving lip service to it?

I especially like the idea of eliminating the traditional dissertation (oh, what I would have done if I could have used video!) and providing expanding opportunities for grad students. I would love to see career fairs for grad students where corporations, think tanks, museums, and other institutions who value the experience of Ph.D’s would come and recruit students. Instead what happens is graduate advisers, who only know the academy, tell you what schools to apply to. A Ph.D. who then takes a job outside the academy either does so because no academic jobs were forthcoming or feels like a sell-out.

Whatever we think of Taylor’s argument, I think there’s a general feeling that the structure at most colleges and universities is not serving the needs of the students (this may not be true at CC’s). The training that students receive, even at SLAC’s, is mostly training for an academic life that most won’t have even if that’s what they want. A broader, more interdisciplinary education has the potential of creating more knowledgeable citizens, who are better prepared to solve the world’s problems. There will still be some who choose to become faculty (and we will need them), but wouldn’t it be great if being an English major didn’t mean that you knew nothing about physics?

Cross-posted at Geeky Mom

Several of my Twitter friends pointed to this Wall Stree Journal blog post on how the Facebook generation will expect to work.  I think many of the tenets Hamel suggests are spot on.  I’d like to examine them in the context of education.  First, go read the article, then come back here.  Here are the points Hamel makes and below each one are my comments for the educational environment.

1. All ideas compete on an equal footing.

Instructors should value what students bring to the class and try to create an environment where the teacher isn’t the only expert in the room.  Both student and teacher bring value to the class on equal footing.  I try to point out when someone posts something interesting on our class blog that I didn’t know about or has an idea that didn’t occur to me in order to encourage the idea that student ideas are as important as mine.

2. Contribution counts for more than credentials.

The teacher at the front of the room obviously has more credentials than the students in the class, but teachers can work to encourage contribution from the students so that that is what’s valued in the class.  This is similar to #1 above, but  can be harder to overcome since students often look at credentials as a way of authenticating that the teacher’s contribution is more important.

3. Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.

Again, because of the received dynamic of the teacher as the expert, this is a hard one to aspire to, but it is true that certain students seem to rise to the top of in-class or online discussion.   The thing to watch out for is that the ones who don’t get an opportunity to contribute.  I think in a classroom, one actually wants to eliminate hierarchies as much as possible.

4. Leaders serve rather than preside.

Approaching teaching as something your doing for the students rather than as some kind of power mongering (I’ve seen this very rarely anyway) can really make your classroom a thriving place for your students.  Offer articles for papers, offer to meet to discuss ideas, and come to the classroom expecting to learn something rather than teaching something.  There’s a balance to be struck, of course, in that you have a limited amount of time, but being generous with what time you do have can go a long way.

5. Tasks are chosen, not assigned.

I actually try to do this in most of my classes.  I don’t give topics for papers and sometimes give rather vague directives about page length, about image inclusion, etc.  I simply ask that it be argumentative and lean toward the academic rather than the casual.  This is very difficult for most students.  They’re used to doing what they’re told.  While assignments are generally necessary, giving students as much freedom within those assignments can help them learn how to choose tasks for themselves.

6. Groups are self-defining and -organizing.

Anyone who teaches has watched groups of students form–those who sit together every class, who comment on each other’s posts or in-class comments.  One can capitalize on this by assigning those students to group projects.  I’ve heard feedback from my students about our small groups that they like to choose their groups.  Sometimes it may be necessary to organize groups for a particular kind of experience, but consider at least trying to let groups form on their own.

7. Resources get attracted, not allocated.

In a classroom, this probably doesn’t apply, but in the larger context of an institution, it would be nice if resource allocation were open to an extent that allows people to gravitate toward interesting ideas.  Instead, there’s still a top-down allocation process.

8. Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.

In the classroom, I always try to be as open as possible and I encourage my students to be as well.  That’s why we blog in public.  I think it’s important for students to see each other’s work and ideas.  At the institutional level, it would certainly be good to have that kind of sharing of information.  Technology could help with this process, but most institutions I know of haven’t yet gotten to the point of being able or willing to share information across the institution.

9. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed.

I’ve done this in many classes, posted potential readings and assignments and let students choose.  I’ve also allowed them to change the direction of the course by voting on it.

10. Users can veto most policy decisions.

I’ve done this in class too.  It’s great when the students feel some ownership over the class.

11. Intrinsic rewards matter most.

This is a value I try to impart, but it’s very hard since many students are used to external rewards such as grades.  I, myself, like external rewards, but those can be very simple and usually I receive the greatest external rewards for projects that have had an instrinsic value for me.  I don’t have grades on individual assignments and I have students evaluate themselves, mostly focusing on what they learned from the class.

12. Hackers are heroes.

I celebrate the student who presents a contrary view–as long as they do so without hurting someone.  Class and blog discussions are most interesting when someone says, “I disagree and here’s why.”

What other ways can these principles play out in the classroom or in educational institutions?  These just came to me off the top of my head.

Birmingham City University in the UK is offering a one-year course to study Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.  Some are naturally skeptical about the need for such a course, especially for one that confers a degree.  One of my friends and colleagues, Alan Levine, has been known to complain about the desire of many people to have step-by-step instructions for using various kinds of social media.  He suggests that people instead just jump in and start using the things, poke around, spend some time getting to know the tools and how they’ll work for you and how you want to use them.  I agree with him to a large extent.  I don’t think you can go through a list of instructions for using Twitter and have figured out exactly the best way to use Twitter after going through the steps.  You’ll have a Twitter account.  You might even have a follower or two, but you won’t know until you spend some time–maybe weeks or months even–exactly how Twitter will be useful to you.

To me, there are two ways of looking at social media.  There are the practical needs of learning to use the various tools out there and figuring out which ones are viable or work better than others and then there are the effects that those tools are having on a variety of industries and society in general.  The course in the UK looks like it will address primarily that first aspect.  And that’s useful for a lot of people.  Whenever I run workshops on social media, I spend a good chunk of time in hands-on instruction of using different software–Flickr, Twitter, Wikis, Blogs, etc.  It’s always good to roll your sleeves up and spend some time actually working with the material rather than just watching or listening to someone else describe how things work.   The other aspect of social media, the changes it’s effecting on our society, is the subject of many a dissertation in a variety of fields, from sociology and anthropology to computer science and rhetoric and composition.  I also always try to spend some time on this aspect as well, especially as it pertains to higher education.  Although I discourage simply using blogs or wikis or multimedia simply to “get with the 21st century,” I also talk about how many students are interested in actively participating in their education through the use of social media.  But I also talk about how social media for our students is a social and recreational part of their lives and they are often reluctant to use these things for “work.”  I approach the use of social media for learning as an untapped resource.  There are many students out there blogging, making podcasts, and posting videos to YouTube on their own.  Why not take advantage of that creativity in the classroom.  It’s also important to recognize the changes that the web and social media have had on the way students do research and the way they might write their papers.

So, do you need a course to learn all this? Maybe.  If you’re completely new to any social media related and not that comfortable experimenting on your own or just don’t know where to start, a good 1-hour introduction might be a good thing for you.  But it needs to be followed with actually using some of the tools.  If you really think that a blog will be useful for teaching, then I’d suggest setting up one and writing in it on a regular basis to see what it will be like for your students.  Don’t expect to set one up the day before class begins and just figure everything out.  Your students will want help and guidance and most of that will come from you, so you’ll need to be somewhat comfortable with the medium.  On the other hand, if you’re hanging out on the web fairly regularly anyway, then I think a course will only be useful to you if it explores some of the finer or more advanced points of using social media.  It would certainly be useful to talk to others who’ve used social media in their classes to find out what worked and what didn’t, what kinds of assignments worked and how they assessed those assignments.  There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.  But you should also keep in mind that not every tool is going to be worth using in your teaching.  Some tools, like Facebook or Twitter, may just be useful to you personally, though it’s certainly worth understanding those tools if your students might be Twittering your lecture.

Via Chris Dawson, I read this Guardian article about the revamping of British primary education to include 21st century communication skills, such as using Twitter and Wikipedia.  Chris’s post includes a quite funny cartoon about the revamped curriculum.  It’s well worth stopping by just for that, as well as Chris’s analysis of the proposed curriculum changes.

I’m all for teaching “21st century skills,” whatever those are.  But I shy away from teaching specific tools.  I think the thing to do is to figure out what the underlying concepts and skills are and teach those with whatever tool makes sense.  Ten years from now, we might not be teaching about using Twitter, but we probably will be teaching about how to find and evaluate information via the Internet in a variety of ways.  One might use Twitter and Wikis and IM to teach collaboration and communication skills.  How do you communicate with your colleague about a project when they’re far away?  Or we might think about fun ways to teach content using these tools.  One criticism of the curriculum is that it’s sacrificing the teaching of certain historical periods.  How could you use blogs, wikis, and podcasts to teach that content instead of teaching blogs, wikis, and podcasts in and of themselves?  For one thing, it’s easier to learn these tools when there’s a specific application for using them and for another, the content might stick better if students are creating their own materials based on the content.  As Chris says, it’s quite possible that this is exactly the way schools will implement these tools, within a good context, but it’s hard to tell from the article.  And that leaves the curriculum open to criticism from folks who feel like things are getting constantly dumbed down.  I’d argue that it’s actually more challenging intellectually to create a podcast about a WWII battle (imagine having to created a fake newscast from the front) than it is to just read about it and listen to a lecture on the facts.  This doesn’t have to be a dumbing down if it’s done well–and therein lies the real challenge.