Emerging Technologies Consulting

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.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the increase in enrollment in online courses.  Today, Inside Higher Ed offers a story along the same lines, focusing on the effort it takes to get those courses online and to make them attractive to students.  One of the attractions of online courses that I mentioned before is that they are usually cheaper than classes held face-to-face.  In part, this is because faculty are sometimes not remunerated appropriately for their efforts.  Despite the fact that it often takes more time to develop and teach a course online, faculty are sometimes paid less or not paid any extra for teaching a course online. Another way these courses are kept cheap is by enrolling more students than one would in a traditional class.  This works for some types of  classes, but most people are discovering that class limits are not so much about the number of physical seats, but the amount of time faculty can devote to working with students.  Faculty are still willing to teach these courses because they want to offer different learning opportunities for their students.  Online courses offer greater flexibility and attract different types of students.

What I hear over and over again in working with faculty who are putting part or all of their courses online is how much time it takes, especially in the up front development of courses.  Some schools offer summer programs with stipends and staff support to help faculty develop their courses.  Others offer small grants or course releases during the semester the new course is being taught.  Still others simply offer a top-notch support staff that does a lot of the time-consuming work of developing the course, with the faculty member serving in more of a consultant role.  Increasing pay for faculty or rewarding them monetarily for teaching online is good incentive if a tough sell during tough times.  But if online enrollments are increasing, the money brought in through these increased enrollments should more than make up for it.

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.

As you can probably tell from the links in the last post, I’m coming down from a trip to Paris.  Today is Bastille Day and because I was just in Paris a few days ago, I thought it appropriate to celebrate by cooking a few things.  I am, at this very moment, waiting for croissants to rise.

What I wanted to talk about, though, is language.  I took 4 years of French in high school and another couple of years in college, thinking I might even major in it.  That was 20 years ago.  I failed to seriously brush up on my French before we went, so although I tried to speak it a little, I got a lot of funny looks as people tried to decipher what I was saying.  Usually, they then switched to English, for which I was actually grateful and not in the least offended.  I had a slightly better experience 20 years ago when I took a trip to Paris in that my French was more current and I think I sounded a bit better, but still, I didn’t have to use it that much.  I gave someone the time.  I ordered bread (pain) and coffee (du cafe).  For more complex transactions, my friend, a fluent French speaker, did all the talking.  I find my lack of real knowledge about French, despite so many years of studying it, rather disappointing.  It would be nice to truly be able to speak the language.  I think two things kept me from really learning the language.  One, we did not speak French that much in class and two, when we did, it was not to ask directions or order food, it was about, as Eddie Izzard demonstrates so nicely–cats on chairs and monkeys on branches (La chat est sur la chaise et le singe est sur la branche.)  Mostly we learned to read French and to write it.  I actually read a Zola in French, but I don’t think I’m going to have a conversation with a waiter about that.  Now, I passed up a couple of opportunities that might have helped.  Every week, there was French table in the cafeteria where only French could be spoken.  Presumably, the conversations were about real things–what we were eating, what we were going to do on the weekend, etc.  By the time this came into my consciousness, I’d decided to drop French as a major.  I also could have gone abroad to France and studied.  Again, I’d dropped French before really exploring this option.

When I was in college, the Internet barely existed.  The web didn’t yet exist.  We barely even had computers, much less networked computers.  Now, though, there are many ways I could immerse myself in a language, thanks to the web.  I can read or watch French news or tv.  Better yet, you can actually have conversations over the net with real people.  The Mixxer is a site where one can find people to converse with in different languages.  I’ve signed myself up despite no forthcoming trips to Paris, alas.  But I’d like to not let my French die and next time I go to France, I’d like to avoid such funny looks.

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.

Over the last few days, I’ve been working on putting together a video to be presented at a conference on language learning.  My experience with language learning goes back to my first days of reading.  My mother taught high school French and eventually Spanish and Latin.  When I was around 6 or 7, I remember finding her books and started trying to read them.  The conversations presented in them were stilted and old-fashioned even for the 70s.  It would go (in English) something like this:

Girl: Hello.

Boy: Hello.

Girl: My name is Maria.

Boy: My name is John.

Girl: I live in a blue house.

Boy: I live in a red house.

As Eddie Izzard points out, most of the phrases one learns in language class can never be used in a real conversation.  You never seem to learn how to ask where the bathroom is or how to order a meal properly.  Despite the stilted conversations, I continued studying French through college, almost majoring in it.  Of course, majoring in French meant reading Proust in his native tongue, not actually speaking to French people.  I tried that in the summer of 1989, when an opportunity arose to spend time with a friend in France prior to a summer program in England.  I found out that the average French person hasn’t actually read Proust or Zola.  Further, the people I was staying with were all American and tired of speaking French all the time.  I managed to be able to ask the time (and tell someone the time), order food and ask when the next train was, but beyond that, could not carry on a decent conversation.  As far as I can tell, languages are still taught with a focus on literature rather than on having actual conversations.

In making the video, I was trying to make the point that language learning offers an opportunity to open students up to a larger global community, but only if language teachers allow that to happen.  Sitting in booths and memorizing vocabulary and phrases like “The mouse is under the table” isn’t going to help much.  Yes, students need to learn vocabulary, but they also need to talk to real people in that language.  They can do so quite easily now via the Internet.  They can have blogs, participate in Skype calls or IM chats, record podcasts, or participate in virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft.  Unfortunately, many teachers aren’t taking advantage of what’s out there instead using the same old rote memorization and stilted conversation methods.  My experience with language teachers has been similar to my experience with other teachers.  There is a small minority experimenting with having their students keep blogs or even have conversations with students who speak the language natively, but most teachers are relying on 20 year old textbooks and recorded material.

My French is rusty now, and most people think of French as an elite language that lets you travel to France and order fancy meals and wine.  However, when I was in high school, some immigrants from Laos showed up in our town and besides the Laotian language, they spoke French.  My mother ended up being the only one who could talk to them.  French is spoken in many countries in Africa as well.  So, even though we think of many European languages as being limited to Europe, thanks to a long history of colonization, these languages are spoken in many countries around the world, opening up an opportunity for students to connect with developing countries and to understand the history of colonization and its impact–on the language, yes–and also on the people and the economy.

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In addition to thinking about the possibilities of language learning beyond where my own classes took me, in looking for video and images to include in my video, I learned quite a bit.  I wanted to find factory photos to represent the idea of industrial education and narrowed it down to child labor photos.  That led me to a set of photos related to a textile plant in Birmingham.  Later, I ended up at a set of postcards about mining in Pennsylvania.  I was fascinated by both sets of images and it really brought the whole child labor issue into sharp relief.  (Despite reading Zola, it’s hard to imagine what child labor was really like).  I also found my way to these Lewis Hines photos, many of which are on Flickr.  As I kept exploring, I watched two different talks, one on kids teaching kids and one on Global Citizen Year.  The first showed up in my feed reader.  The second one I found via photos from Flickr.  My collaborators introduced me to the Life photos hosted by Google, which was a treasure trove of images of classrooms past.

It never ceases to amaze me how much information is available on the Internet.  And the more amazing thing is that it’s only a drop in the bucket.  It’s easy to get lost in the pathways, but it’s also just as easy to make really amazing discoveries.  I wonder if I could brush up on my French using similar pathways, by forcing myself to read French blogs, for example.  Seems like a definite possibility.

The following video is an entertaining and effective explanation of how video games intended for entertainment only can teach something or spark interest in learning by providing small elements that reference real-world items or events.  By providing ways for players to follow those interests in game–without disrupting the game–can turn an entertaining game into a learning one.  Here’s my own personal example. When my son first started playing Runescape, he needed to create bread, but the game doesn’t quite tell you how.  The game is semi-medieval in its time-frame, so he needed to know how bread was made in that time period.  He asked me, and I explained that they would have had to mill their grain first into flour and then use yeast and other ingredients to make the bread.  The milling was the crucial piece of the puzzle for him and now he knows how bread was made (and still is, though more mechanically).  I have written about this before (with the same Runescape example, plus others).  I think the more examples we have of how to tap into the learning potential of games, the better.

Just a month ago, I pointed to two discussions around the idea of banning laptops in the classroom, and this week Tim Burke references Margaret Soltan’s pulling out a quote from an interview with Douglas Grooothuis, author of The Soul in Cyberspace.  How’s that for a tangled web.  So here’s my thought.  Laptops, netbooks, mobile devices, they’re here to stay.  Students are going to use them, sometimes effectively, sometimes not.  Did we, do we police their handwritten notetaking?  Do we ask if they’re jotting down the key points or drawing a cartoon version of us?  In junior high and high school, maybe.  In college, no.  My general feeling is that students are grownups and while I think we can do things in our classrooms to model best practices for using electronic devices, as many suggest, for example having students look up information, I think it’s up to the students themselves to learn how best to engage with the class or to find classes that work for them.  And I don’t have a problem with wandering around a room so that students are inclined to keep their laptop screen clean.  And yes, I’ve seen students with Facebook up.  I don’t call them on it.  Instead I ask them a hard question related to the discussion.  If they’ve been paying attention, they’ll be able to answer it.  More than 9 times out of 10, they can.  For a student perspective on this, read Shannon Hauser’s comment.

I think we should ignore the naysayers.  It’s their perogative to ban laptops if they want.  They can’t tell the rest of us what to do.