I usually recommend trying one tool at a time.  And if you can’t figure out the basics in less than 1/2 hour, move on to something else.  Like Weir said,  technology should make your teaching easier or better, and a tool that takes forever to master usually isn’t doing either.  If school starts for you in a month, now is a good time to start playing around with some tools.  Other advice I’ve often given faculty is to use the tools for a while before you ask your students to.  If you want to try a blog for a course, you’d better at least do some blog reading and commenting, better yet, blog yourself.  It’s also a good idea to let your students know when something is an experiment.  Explain why you’re using what you’re using and get some feedback as you go along.  They’re much more forgiving when something doesn’t go quite right if you’ve let them know it’s new to you.

Using technology in the classroom can really add something to your teaching and to your students’ learning when done well, and it takes some trial and error to figure out exactly how to use it well, so don’t be afraid to give something a shot this year, get some good feedback and tweak it for next semester.  Sometimes you do get lucky, and things turn out great the first time around.

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.

All this testing is in an effort to build up a good toolbox for creating a personal learning network/environment and for helping faculty do so as well.  More on that soon!

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.

What I liked about it was its clever use of images and text as well as the commentary it made not just on the current event, but how the underlying technology rests on a set of assumptions made by programmers. It really highlighted for me the way that assumptions about gender and technology can be programmed into a site like Amazon, not with malicious intent, but in a way that is still hurtful.

A lot of things came out of our discussion of these projects and the effect of them on our thinking.  We talked a lot about the process of creating them, where the struggle of technological constraints was much more apparent than it is in writing, even though that, too, is a technology students struggle with.  My co-teacher, Anne, wrote up some of our thoughts from the first round of conversations about the projects.  One student felt that the open-ended nature of the projects was like a “get out of jail free card” in that no one had to make any definitive statements like one might have to do in a paper.  Anne says that for her, the quality of the questions is what’s important, though she needs to think about it more.  But I think I agree with Anne.  Most of our students, who in this class range from freshman to seniors in a variety of disciplines, don’t have enough information yet to provide definitive answers to the questions we asked in this class.  But, as these projects showed, the questions students are asking are much more complex than they were at the beginning of class.  When you start with questions about what is gender and end up in a place where we’re asking what is the self, I think you have a successful class.  And I think getting there required this exploration via digital means.

I don’t think that using this media was a “get out of jail free card.”  I think for many students, this process was difficult, time-consuming, and forced them to think about how to represent their ideas in ways that writing a standard paper just doesn’t.  I’m not suggesting that we abandon papers altogether, but I think there’s real value to having students wrestle with their ideas in different ways.  I originally thought the main point of using a project like this would be to encourage less technically experienced students to learn some new technology.  And certainly, that was one thing that happened, but I’m surprised by how that wasn’t the main thing that happened.  I had hoped that the kinds of things students would get out of it were this new way of thinking, but I had no idea if that would be successful.  I would say it definitely was.

On the Net, children have to search for, rather than simply look at, information. This forces them to develop thinking and investigative skills – and much more. They must become critics. Which Web sites are good? How can I tell what is real and what is fictitious – whether in a data source or in the teenage movie star in a chat session.

True enough, but just because they have to search doesn’t mean they do it well. In fact, Bullen points out that the study shows that students’ search skills have not improved: “internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority.”  I have seen students in my office really struggle to find sources for papers.  When I ask them where they’ve looked, whether they’ve searched the library databases, I often get, The library has databases? I’ve looked for books, but haven’t found anything. I searched Amazon. Amazon.  That’s where they’re looking for research information.  Maybe better than Google, but still.  And these are smart, capable students.  All the librarians out there are in a rage, I’m sure.  Whenever I’m confronted with this personally, I actually show them how to do research.  Honestly, I start with Google Scholar.  It’s simple and easy to use, which the students recognize immediately.  I do tell them that only a small fraction of what’s available via the library is available via Google Scholar, but that often one reason to do the search is to figure out better keywords to use in the library databases, which is always where I go next.  Students are sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of information that comes up in both of these searches.  They’re also amazed at how I’ll sort the search, depending on what’s important: relevance, date, etc.  And I often scroll through pages of results, scanning for things that look useful.  Whether they take this information and use it or not, I don’t know, but it seems clear to me that many students cannot find and evaluate material.  They’re looking for a quick fix.  The ones that come to discuss it with me are actually the exceptions; they at least recognize that the quick search has not turned up anything useful.  The other 80% have probably settled for the quick search results.

Bullen’s other post points out the cloudy research methodology of Tapscott’s book.  First, he used as his sample people who were already online.  Almost everything was conducted online, often via Facebook.  As far as we know, and we don’t know much because the research is funded privately and therefore proprietary, he did not include in his sample students who aren’t on Facebook or who aren’t comfortable working online.  Like I said above, some students are good at navigating the online world, but I’ve seen many who are shy about it, confused by it, or playing with fire in it.  Even the ones who are in Facebook every day and who may keep a blog don’t necessarily know how to leverage their online presence to get a job or promote themselves.  And they may rely only on friends for evaluating information.

We need to continue to be skeptical about the information coming out of studies about the Net Generation.  And we need to continue to study the skills of students.  And we need to continue to teach those skills rather than simply shelter them by simply forcing them to use only hand-selected sources or worse, assuming they are good at finding and evaluating information.  Bullen, and other skeptics, are not suggesting that we avoid technology, but that we need to be critical of even the most fabulous-sounding technology.  Too often educators only reluctantly pay attention because they  feel they have to use technology to reach this generation.  It’s okay to be skeptical and critical.  We should think carefully about how we use technology in our teaching.  Technology only makes the world better if we use it effectively and ethically.  We need to help our students learn how to use the tools in ways that help them and hopefully will help the world.

The second post is from Wired Campus at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it references a talk by Cole Camplese (someone I get to meet in a month) where he suggests ways that students might draw information from the Internet during class and bring that to the class discussion.  I know someone who does this regularly.  Anyone who has a laptop in class (and we’re a campus where laptop usage is fairly sparse) gets called on to look stuff up.  This means that they usually don’t have time to be in Facebook or on IM.  They have to be ready to respond.  The comments on the post are representative of the camps people tend to fall in: those that outright want to ban laptops and those that think professors should find a way to use them effectively.  I do think it’s okay to tell students to close their laptops for portions of the class; I’ve done this in my classes.  But I think one needs to treat students like the adults they are.  Maybe they’re taking notes, maybe they’re not.  This would be true without laptops.  I can remember writing letters home during some particularly boring lectures.  Most express a concern that the students are not concentrating, and that may indeed be true, but there may be ways to use laptops to help with concentration.  The wiki example above might help students focus.

One comment on the WC post really struck me as odd:

I teach in the sciences, like the two physics professors in the article. I agree completely with them. So do virtually all my peers… the only holdouts are the folks teaching the non-majors courses. There isn’t as much priority in teaching critical thinking, so those instructors can goof around a lot more.

There seemed to be a lot of assumptions going on in this.  First, that teachers teaching non-majors weren’t also teaching critical thinking.  I would guess, based on the science faculty I’ve talked to, that those teaching non-majors try harder to connect their subject to students’ lives, helping them see science at work in everything they do, or helping them understand and critique science as it gets reported in the news.  Also, the idea that figuring out effective ways to use technology is goofing around is particularly galling.  The easy way out is to ban them altogether, and in part, I don’t blame faculty for doing this.  It’s hard enough to teach without also figuring out what to do with this new element.  And that’s the conclusion I increasingly come to about using technology, whether it’s laptops in the classroom or a blog or a wiki.  Using these tools effectively requires a lot of creative thinking, a lot of work to set up, and a lot of retraining of students who are used to being lectured at, and that’s really hard work, not goofing around.

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But I think that everyone who works in IT should be on the user side every once in a while.  Even though I am quite familiar with the day-to-day work and life of a faculty member, there’s been something eye-opening about having to be one in this environment.  Just today, I went to scan a book chapter for my class and three scanners I tried all failed.  One failed after I’d already gone through the whole scanning process and then the document disappeared into the ether.  I spent 45 minutes for nothing.  It was lost time.  Working on the blog site for the course also presented problems.  At the beginning of the semester, I had access to the “innards” of the site and could upload plugins and themes as we were trying to get the site right for the course.  But later, I lost this access (and really probably shouldn’t have had it to begin with), so we could no longer make dramatic changes without getting an IT person to do it for us.  So we didn’t ask for anything.

As an IT staff member, I know I complained about faculty’s last-minute requests for help with technology, but I’m beginning to understand more about why that happens and why there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.  Any responsive faculty member who wants to use technology effectively isn’t going to have their technology perfectly functional on day one of the class.  They might get to class and find that there are more or fewer students than they thought.  After the first assignment to post on the blog or in the wiki or on the discussion board, they find they need to make some changes to make that process work better for the students.  The students might suggest an RSS feed from the New York Times.  A class is shaped as much as possible before the class begins, but most faculty allow the class to take shape as it goes along, and therefore, the technology needs to be shaped and reshaped as well.  Sometimes, systems are put into place that allow a great deal of flexibility and are easy enough that the faculty member can do some of the work herself, but sometimes they’re not, and sometimes IT people don’t realize the problems they’re creating when they use such systems.

One thing I’ve somewhat come to relutctantly realize is that sometimes using what’s readily available online as opposed to what the school provides is easier.  As a faculty member, one certainly has more control and access to a web space or blog or wiki that one has signed up for personally (and decided on for oneself) than campus-based applications.  I think this is especially true if you’re tech savvy and want that kind of control.  For other faculty, a campus application like Blackboard, that offers some flexibility, but not a lot of customization, might be just fine. There are in-between faculty, though, that I think lose out the most.  They don’t always know enough about the technoology to go off on their own, but they’re disappointed with the standard CMS.  For them, a campus-supported blog or wiki or other application would be useful.  But they might bump into the kinds of problems I did.  What if none of the themes are appealing?  What if they need some added functionality? In some IT departments, they might have to put in a requisition weeks in advance.  By then, the class is over and the customization that would have enhanced it never got done.

Two things, I think, can solve this problem.  One, training and education about off-site appications.  That way, faculty know what their options are and they know how to use them.  Two, install the applications on-site and provide support for it.  These may not be the only options, but these seem like viable ones.  In all likelihood, most places will do some combination of these.  Schools wanting to capitilze on the work faculty are doing on the web (presuming it’s in the open), might want to go for option 2, so that it’s easier to aggregate that work.  Schools who have fewer support staff might opt for option 1.

What other problems are out there? What other solutions?  How do you allow faculty flexibility and space to be innovative and maintain whatever security you need to?

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.