Prepping for the job interview: hilarity ensues

To-do list for campus interview prep:

Flight plans in place? Check!

No-fuss haircut? Check!

Wrestling the job talk into submission? (sort of) Check!

Catastrophic laptop failure? Check.

I'm typing this on a new laptop. I spent about 10 hours today shuttling in the rain between the Apple store (a city over), home, Best Buy (another city over), the Apple store (again), and home, then moving data around so everything works. Before those trips there was hemming and hawing over where to buy the laptop--the Apple store, where I can get the education discount, or Fry's Electronics, where I know from (sigh) experience they'll give me an identical loaner computer, complete with data transfer, if something goes wrong with the machine. And because there's a chance I'll be living someplace different in the next year, I was cautious and did some research: ends up the university city where I'm interviewing has neither an Apple store nor a Fry's. Damn. (Of course, neither does my current burb, but having both within driving distance is nice.)

But in the end, it really wasn't so catastrophic--except for the unexpected expense--as I rescued all the data, but I lost an (reserved! emptied! weekend!) day of interview prep. Somehow I doubt the other candidates spent today twiddling their thumbs. . .

In other news, I'm wondering, the Chronicle's advice aside, how one balances potential snow showers with interview shoes. . . Fingers crossed that the 10-day forecast for sunnier weather holds, lest I develop hypothermia and require toe amputation. Wouldn't that be a great campus interview cautionary tale, forever immortalized in the Chronicle's online career column archives? I'd be right up there with the guy who showed up for an interview in a Tweety Bird t-shirt, or the candidate who ran from the room to throw up from anxiety. Or that woman who blogs about goldfish constipation even though she's on the job market.*

*As evidence I have been thinking about museums, I offer "What's your museum's 'cello side'?" from Museum Blogging.

Liveblogging another New Media Conference session: Five Minutes of Fame

Again, I'm liveblogging. What follows are summaries of rapid-fire, 5-minute-long presentations on projects. Reflection to follow.

Note: The featured bloggers have a giant podium blocking the screen, so these are going to be harder to evaluate/comment on.

Browyn Stuckey, Building a Community Out of Online Professional Development

Quest Atlantis. Mashup for Quest Atlantis Teacher Community. It's a virtual world environment with a game structure for curriculum delivery. Built on the ActiveWorlds platform. It's now approaching 600 quests and 100 different missions that children accomplish as part of the game structure. (Note: I'm not a gamer, so I'm not sure what that means. . .) A socially responsible game: emphasizes learning, playing, and helping. Involves face-to-face and online teacher training and professional development. Emphasizes ideas of embodied cognition. Teacher professional development occurs both through facilitated sessions and through missions in the virtual world. A mashup of events, activities, and sources across many platforms to meet teachers where they already live online--e.g. Facebook, Slideshare, YouTube.

Jackie Gerstein, Creative Web Tools For and By Kids

Creative Web Tools wikis. Students take on the role of stewardship of their own experiences. Students created animated introductions with their own voices to preview their own projects. Students pick their topics and get a wiki page. They use Doppel Me, Moblyng slide shows, Wordle. Students set their own learning goals, evaluate the tools' utility for other students. Free tools: Image Chef, Tux Paint and Doink, Wordle, Newspaper Generator, Animoto, PicLits, Tikatok Books, Dipity Timeline. Students like to create polls and tests using MyStudiyo.

Virginia Kuhn, Documentary is the New Black: Filmic Textbooks in the 21st Century Classroom

Students who are not cinema students even though they are located in the school of cinematic arts. Students take four years of classes with them, culminates in a multimedia thesis product in any discipline. The inaugural cohort finished their thesis projects last year. Students needed some facility with the tools, but also in creating a large-scale research project. She created IML340: The Praxis of New Media. Very lucky to have a lot of production staff. So there was a project ongoing: Iraqi Doctors on the Front Lines of Medicine, and they combined it with IML340 to create the Iraqi Doctors Project. Web site. Implications for large-scale public literacy. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television -- Jerry Mander, 1978 -- argued for books over television. With emergent technologies these days, we have time to go back and look and stop--which we couldn't in 1978. New collab with Brave New Films.

Marie Carianna and Derek Toten, Good! Bien! Ütz! Maya Language Learning from Guatemala to Tulane

Since the 1980s: six-week Kaqchikel Maya language and culture immersion course. Toten is speaking like an auctioneer--I can't keep up. Application is in a CD-ROM and online form. Have finished two units thus far. Within each topic, students initially see just the dialogue part of each lesson, and then they see the activities. Text captioning in Kaqchikel can be turned on or off. Lesson text available in Spanish or English. Online only: student can record their own utterances and compare with speakers'. The production happened over five trips to Guatemala during the summers. Post-production and application design in spring and fall. They hope to have the whole thing online by 2011. Two pedagogy specalists, two production folks. Use high-def cameras, lots of lights, microphones. A whole big production. Very careful with audio because it's for language learning.

Li Zhu and Michael Beahan, Dartmouth College, Jones Media Center: How do I. . .?

A multimedia center in the library. Beahan is director; Li Zhu ("Julie") is a year-long intern and graduate student. Many faculty were unaware that the media center offers more than DVDs and free scanning. So Julie put together a multimedia promo video to market their services to faculty, as well as an instructional video, tutorials, and even recorded their workshops for future use. The instructional video camera helps keep media center staff from getting burned out on answering the questions again and again. Instructional videos are no longer than 90 seconds. Videos are on the Jones Media Center website, on YouTube, and on the library's Facebook page.

Kate Borowske, Hamline University, Library on a Stick and On the Air

Borowske is a librarian and works with a low-residency MFA program in writing (?) for children and young adults. Three-pronged approach: toolbar, online workshops, recorded workshops. Toolbar allows them to search the resources they most frequently use--e.g. university or state databases, ebooks, literary criticism, journal literature. Conduit: Makes it easy to create toolbars. Series of four online workshops via Elluminate Live. Designed content around the toolbar. She wanted to show them all the resources, but have them anchored in the toolbar so they were easier to remember. Then she recorded the Elluminate sessions.

Larry Johnson, The NMC's Hakone (TM) Project: New Life for Second Life

Hakone, Japan is where NMC was born at an Apple forum in 1992. People would fly to Japan, write up their experiences on the way home, and send them out a couple weeks later. Johnson read from one such story which predicted the convergence of telecommunications and computing, and predicted that multimedia productions would once be available on compact disc. At the meeting, Apple announced it would launch the Newton. NMC has built a virtual forum that is a reflection of Hakone.

Paul Iwancio, Aaron Weidele, and William Shewbridge, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Taking Digital Stories on the Road

Wanted to commemorate the Meyerhoff Scholars program's 20th anniversary. Program promotes the participation of underrepresented people in science. Captured 60 stories during the two-day anniversary symposium by using a story booth they created. Black backdrop, chair, lights, video. Scouted locations ahead of time--a classroom, a coat closet, etc. Tried to negotiate the quietest locations possible. Bought a backdrop from a theatrical supply company. Scheduled the interviews--had a sign-up sheet. Had undergraduates currently in the Meyerhoff program conduct the interviews with alumni. When students weren't available, they had interviewees interview each other in pairs or groups of three. Distribution: Meyerhoff website, DVD (have distributed thousands of copies), YouTube. Future projects: homecoming, campus retreat, UMBC heritage project, department oral histories.

Morgan Reid, University of British Columbia, Talking to Our Computers? Transcribing Interview at 2:!!

Needed to transcribe data to text for qualitative analysis. Transcription services were too expensive for the amount of data he had. Check out "Voice Wreckognition" demo on Youtube--existing software was bad. Get high quality recording. Don't work from a live feed. 99% accuracy or better--no spelling mistakes, just an occasional incorrect word. Software: MacSpeech Dictate. Necessary: Express Scribe, any text editor, Dictate 1.2.1, good audio quality in data file, good quality microphone, really good audio isolation for listening. Nice demo!

Jared Bendis, Case Western Reserve University, Teaching the Elephant to Walk Itself: Self-Generating Pachyderm

Another rapid-fire speaker. Digital Case is an initiative of The Kelvin Smith Library. Digital library is an archive of collections, research, historical library materials, any intellectual output of the institution. Also meant to do dissemination, but almost no user interface--a common problem with digital archives. Decided to try to make a user interface with Pachyderm. 1. Log into your account. 2. Upload your assets. 3. Author your screens. 4. Publish your Pachyderm. More Advanced: integrate existing database assets into Pachyderm--museums can do this. Decided to use Pachyderm as an output standard instead of an authoring platform. Query a database, and the results are jpg, xml, and Pachyderm files. Authorship is in the curation of the collection--making a good database makes a good thing. Demo uses beta Pachyderm 2.1. No uploading to Pachyderm--generated from a database. What's next? Design new rule systems to be able to play with the database.

Liveblog: Marco Torres at the New Media Consortium conference

This morning I'm live blogging a talk by Marco Torres called "It's Not about Clicking and Dragging! It's Not about Blogging, Podcasting, Web 2.0'in." Again, as with the Kathy Sierra talk (see previous post), I'll be taking notes and reporting during the talk, and I'll be adding notes later.

Torres starts with a demo. Rule 1: Randomly hit black keys and you can't mess up, as long as you stay with a rhythm. He does this using a small keyboard in GarageBand.

The area of media we talk least about is music. He said he was in Australia recently, and 80 percent of the (independent?) films he saw had copyright violations with their music.

(He plays some notes.)

Torres takes a very mathematical approach to teaching, meaning he prefers the GarageBand keyboard view instead of the musical staff view.

Torres uses an oscilloscope on his iPhone to see the waves of notes to demonstrate dissonance. He plays a perfect fourth ("That's Free Willy!) and then the half-step interval of Jaws. One says "Climb aboard, I'll take you there." The other says "Swim away NOW!"

Torres created a really nice demo on Garageband, mixing grand piano, orchestral strings, and Mexican guitarron, then switching these out with with some Chinese zither and Chinese erhu violin. He then adds some beats, copies the earlier grand piano track, moves it up an octave and switches it to Chinese guitar and adds some hip-hop beats. It sounds pretty awesome as the opening soundtrack for a movie. Impressive! I'll definitely have to play around with GarageBand later.

Torres's mother was an accomplished photographer. He talks about how difficult photography, especially large-format photography, used to be, and yet how cool it felt to actually create something. Photography became very important to Torres.

Another important part of his past is two uncles who creates some of the worst movies every to come out of Mexico--movies about Mexican wrestlers solving the world's problems, incuding vampires and drug cartels.

In movie making, the people involved often have no idea what the other people working on the film are doing. He began to think about the value of a story, especially in education. Stories make stuff have a purpose, rather than making stuff the purpose.

Visuals are powerful. People tend to remember powerful events in images--the Kennedy assassination, Rodney King beating, Challenger explosion, etc. In talking with teachers, he's never had anyone remember something powerful in terms of something they read--it was always in terms of sensory data--what they saw, what they heard.

Torres asked students (age 14-16) what they need to receive, create, produce, and broadcast information. Principals are influential in what students can receive, create, produce, and broadcast in schools. But when the average principal (average age late 40s to early 50s) was in school, there were far fewer ways to receive, create, produce, and broadcast information. Are we limiting our students to pen and paper when there are so many more rich channels?

Torres cites times in his life when he knew the content and context of the subject he was presenting really well, but he was nervous or uncomfortable with their delivery.

We let IT people write policy in education. They often determine which technologies teachers will use and to which technologies students will have access.

The learner is more than a recipient of information.

A student's preferred receptive and productive modalities may not be the same. You can be an auditory learner/receiver and a visual or kinesthetic producer.

We have easy access to information that it used to be difficult to access (he cites the iPhone app CongressPlus).

Torres asked the social studies teachers at a school what makes them an expert. After listening to each of them speak in turn, he asked if he could learn all the information they knew by using Google.

Story: Torres was listening to people debate whether Jeremiah Wright hated white people. Torres downloaded Wright's talk, hooked up a splitter to his earbuds, gave each women a pair of earbuds, and let them listen to the talk. One of the women later turned around and said, "Remind me never to debate anyone with an iPhone."

Ask 9th to 12th graders what they think of school, and the overwhelming answer is "boring."

Torres cites Alton Brown (of Good Eats) as someone who does a really good job at reaching this group. The develops the math, science, and history behind something, and he delivers it with emotional impact. Torres asked Brown's people how they develop a show, and they said, "Oh, we do it just like you educators do." And Torres sighed and said uneasily, "Yeah, sure we do."

(Graph coming soon. (Note to self--red, blue, and yellow))

Mythbusters is also about watching people learn. They're not teaching; they're learning. That makes a huge difference. Ninth graders want to see the process, not just the results.

The learning part is easy. The thing that gets in the way is schooling.

The demand for skills has changed. Schooling gets in the way of developing the higher cognitive skills. Schooling is linear; learning is networked.

Games today, like Call of Duty, can take a kid 30 minutes to explain. Torres: "It didn't take me 20 minutes to explain Frogger.

Fans have changed how Lost has been written. With DVR technology, online forums, wikis, interactive maps, blogs, etc., the viewers are able to analyze the show very carefully. People are debating each other in their native--and different--languages (e.g. Dutch vs. Spanish). Lost is really difficult to explain to a nonviewer. Fans are participants and learners.

Can we get this same kind of learning environment in the classroom and at schools? Lost's writers aren't having curriculum meetings.

When today's principals and educators were growing up, Gilligan's Island was a pretty typical show, and the kind of testing is similar: "Was there a scientist on board?" "True or False: Maryanne and Ginger were best friends." Lost viewers don't care about these kinds of questions.

Torres tells a story of one of his students, David, who was pulled out of school at age 11 by his father to play in cantinas in Mexico for additional income. David is back in school and can play five instruments and sing. Torres: "David, you're your own mariachi band." Torres called on David to provide soundtracks for documentaries and films he was making. David remade the Star Wars songs--after watching the movies for the first time--as mariachi songs. Torres played some clips--they're awesome. (Just imagine the Star Wars march, the Cantina song, or the Imperial March as played by a mariachi band--it's terrific.)

Torres: If I had given David just the option of text or numbers--that wasn't his medium. That's not how he produced information. In fact, David wasn't even allowed to play in the high school orchestra because he didn't play the music the music director. John Williams send the hand score from the original Star Wars film to David, saying he liked David's version the best. After hearing him play, George Lucas even hired David.

Torres's links:
Challenge-Based Learning
Flick School
student films

Live blogging: Kathy Sierra, Cognitive Seduction

I'm here at the New Media Consortium Conference in Monterey, CA, and I've been tapped to be a featured blogger--which means I get the big room's only access to power and Ethernet, as well as a seat at a table in front of the front row. My fellow featured bloggers are Gardner Campbell and Chris Lott, so be sure to check out their blogs, too.

I'll be live blogging this session initially, and then going back to add some reflection and notes, so if you're reading this Thursday morning, please check back in the afternoon or evening for updates.

Pop Quiz: Which is better: (A) "This company kicks ass" or (B) "This product kicks ass." For example, is a better predictor of success someone raving about an author or a book?

We're having an argument here at the table as to which is correct. We're thinking she may go for (C) a cult of personality or voice.

Ah! I'm correct! Secret answer (C) is correct: "I kick ass!"

This definitely makes sense in the context of courses and professors and universities. When debating whether or not to take a course, students seem to talk most about who is teaching the class.

How can companies elicit first-person language, and create experiences that cause first-person language to happen? It's all about the USER kicking ass.

Next question: What did (do) you want to be really, really good at?

For me: hoo boy, that's a tough one. Maybe being a novelist? Following through on playing the French horn? The consensus at this table is: music. I'm apparently sitting between two aspiring electric guitarists. (Men!)

Question: how can you help people be their best at whatever it is they want to be or do? Sierra calls this "The High-Res User Experience." She throws out the idea of tossing out the marketing department in favor of educators. (Hear, hear!)

Half Dome: she sees a big rock. Her husband, a rock climber, sees handholds. Sierra sees death.

Jazz: Experienced listeners hear more notes.

In programming language, Sierra's wine expertise is one bit: red or white.

Being better is better.

No one is passionate about things they suck at.

The point of software development is to move people from inability to ability relatively quickly. Need to move users to a steeper learning curve--but not necessarily with making it feel harder. (Great graph--photo (hopefully) coming later this evening.)

But it's not about the tools we build. It's about what our tools let them do. Not understanding that is reflected in things like technical manuals. Markting materials before people buy a camera are slick, glossy, beautiful, communicative. The manuals (after they buy the camera) is plain, dull, black and white, confusing. Marketing materials: Taking killer photos. Manual: About the camera.

People want to take awesome photos, not learn to use the camera. So, let's help them get really good at something.

I'm thinking about what this means not just for students, but to museum visitors. Museum visitors want to have an enjoyable experience and maybe learning something. Museum exhibits have learning objectives. Where do the two meet?

Mind and brain are in epic battle. Mind is civilized, brain is primal.

Brain is filtering everything that comes at it, trying to decide what gets through. Answer: not much. Brain is devoted to not writing things to long-term memory. We need to work against that.

Example: Students studying, cramming--they don't retain much, even when they're motivated to learn.

So what does the brain pay attention to? Chemistry--that which it feels. So if we can evoke a feeling, the brain thinks it must be important. Reading textbooks is an emotional flatline.

The brain pays attention to weird things. (Example: fortune cookie that says "You will die a horrible death.") We look at faces, at bodies in a moment of thrill or excitement (e.g. watching extreme sports), cute animals (no one in this room awwww'd at the photo of the baby, but at least half the room awwww'd at the photo of a puppy).

Our brains are tuned to look at things and say, "Look, that's not resolved." There are so many cheap tricks to get people to pay attention to say what's the story.

There are lots of things the brain doesn't care about. The smiley, happy, computer-using person holding a tablet PC: "Yeah, not so much," says the brain. Same thing with photos of teachers standing in front of a screen.

Brain doesn't care about code. So it's important to visualize. So put a face with a code. Wake up the brain, increase attention and memory, but then you risk it being about the wrong thing: e.g., that face looks exactly like my ex-girlfriend.

So. . . Provoke with designs, including ones that might be painful and nauseating (Sierra uses an example of a UML diagram for programmers).

Conversation beats formal lecture and tone. Collaborative learning is far more effective in problem-solving.

Important: Talk to the brain, not the mind.

Example: Trick the brain: code is like a tiger.

10 ways to help users kick ass.

1. Focus on what the USER does, not what YOU do. (Technical writers write a book focusing on the quality of the book. To make the great technical book, however, might mean putting in a lot of topics that aren't serving the user. Focus instead on the user experience rather than on every little thing the product does. Someone needs to kick ass as a result of this. Don't build a better [x], build a better [user of x]. Not how do we build a better camera--how do we build a better photographer,

Again, thinking about the museum visitor. Here, it would be "Don't build a better museum. Build a better visitor." But that isn't specific enough. I know how to improve museum experiences, offline and on, but I'm not sure how to make a better visitor. It's similar, I suppose, to helping students learn to ask good questions.

2. Give then superpowers, quickly. The company Electric Rain's mission: The "user must do something cool within 30 minutes."

3. Make them smarter. What makes you feel smarter? Technical field folks say brain training, brain games, puzzles--but they only help a little. Aerobic exercise actually improves the brain's exercise more. Stand up and stand on one leg: You just got smarter.

We tried this: academics and technologists are an unbalanced bunch. Time to market balance boards to these users?

Improving your balance helps you get smarter because your brain is using extra cycles trying to keep you balanced. Your brain lets other things get by its filter as a result. Any kind of learning materials and experience should focus on patching cognitive leaks.

4. Don't focus on [X], rather ask what [X] is a subset of. What is the cooler thing that your product helps your user do--meaning cooler than what your competition does?

In an age of university budget cuts, I've been thinking about which departments and units will survive. Unfortunately, there's now not just the usual competition for campus funds between, for a hypothetical example, technocultural studies programs and sustainable ag programs. Which young program will (should) survive, if budget priorities are such that small programs must be cut? It may come down to how much cooler your products or services to students are than other departments or units.

Our teaching center, for example, is under the same vice provost as the internship and career center, two honors programs, summer sessions, and more. When budget cuts get deep enough that units need to be eliminated, what evidence can we provide that the teaching center's programs are cooler? Yes, we have stats on users, but documenting cultural change on campus is harder--how have we enriched undergraduate and faculty life in different (and better) ways than our (usually sister, now competitor) units?

5. Shrink the 10,000 hours it takes to really master something. There are ways to shrink that. Two ways: learn the patterns and shorten the duration. Help your users figure out the patterns. Help users do their 10,000 hours in a shorter period of time. Learn do do knowledge acquisition and representation. Bruce Wilcox is a really substantial player in the artificial intelligence world. He didn't know how to play the game of Go. No computers can beat even a marginally good Go player. But Bruce Wilcox decided to make a software program for Go. So he went out to interview Go players. In the process of doing so, he became a master Go player in record time--because he was looking for rules he could represent in software. So how can we extract those bit of knowledge?

Always be practicing. Sierra wants to practice without wearing out her horses. So she took a dressage saddle and now uses it as her office chair. She had to build a custom desk to match its height. . .

(BTW, I heart dressage. Haven't done it for years--too busy with a 3-year-old--but it's a really excellent form of exercise.)

So: create a culture of practice. We expect musicians and dancers and athletes to practice. In certain domains, we expect that of course they'll practice--doing something that is meant for nothing other than practice. But software developers don't have a culture of just practicing. (Do college faculty?)

After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise. (10 years vs. 1 year repeated 10 times) Tiger Woods pop quiz: ow much practice time on his strengths versus weaknesses: 80% practicing his strengths. Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the Right Things.

For example, with the horses, if you want to improve one of their gaits, you don't simply canter a lot--because you build in bad muscle memory. So you change gaits frequently, and it's a miracle--the change that needs to happens, happens.

6. Make your product (or docs) reflect their feelings

If we want people to have a better RTFM, we need to give them a better FM. Help and FAQs are not helpful because they are written for the intellectually curious, who would like to know a little more. Users are actually really frustrated.

"Letting them off the hook" is the killer app. Don't let them feel like idiots.

How you make them feel about themselves drives how they feel about YOU. (Think: students.)

7. Create a culture of support.

Hero's journey: Needs helpful sidekicks and mentor.

Look at user community. Look at terms of service from Javaranch: "be nice." Militarily enforced.

Biggest problem for communities: How do you get them to answer and ask questions? Sierra will always think about communities as groups where people get together for learning and support, not as places where people just hang out for fun.

First rule: No dumb questions. People have to feel comfortable asking questions. It's too easy to say "Duh, search the archives of this forum." Same thing in classroom: The prof already covered that, do the reading, etc.

More important rule: No dumb answers. It could just mean having a couple of documents very visible: here's how to answer a question. Get people to consider what it means to really answer a question. In a community, the faster you convert people from askers to answerers, the faster that community is going to grow. (Same thing in classroom--but getting students to learn to ask questions can be tough.)

8. Do not insist on "inclusivity." Because passionate users talk differently--they have jargon and shorthand. It's nice not to have to explain everything--conversations get richer faster.

Measuring community success. Success = more users thinking fast.

9. Make the right thing easy, wrong thing difficult. Horse trainer's advice. Not always easy to implement. For example, for getting fit: treadmill gathering cobwebs. It's not in the corner because you don't use it; you don't use it because it's in the corner. Make it so that you'll literally trip over it if you don't use it.

10. Total immersion jams. 16 hours over two days vs. 16 hours over two months. Frequency matters. Especially important for creativity breakthroughts. Example: Ad Lib from the Game Development Society. So they get together and write entire games over the weekend instead of going through the typical extended development process. The games must be finished over the weekend--even if it's crappy. An add-on: the developers must share the CDs they listened to as they were designing the game.

Quote from 48-hour film jam site: "The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it."

Closing thought: Be brave.

Update: A day later, I'm still thinking about Sierra's talk, and I'm stuck on one piece: In what ways are college students "users"? Part of me is uncomfortable with the idea of students as users--after all, if we're not careful, "users" = "consumers," and it seems that in much of Sierra's talk the two merged. I prefer not to think of students as consumers, but rather as participants. In that sense, Sierra's consideration of growing user participation and expertise on online forums like JavaRanch is closer to what I want to accomplish in the classroom.

How can we make higher ed more accessible?

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, and I had the privilege of accompanying an academic mentor and friend of mine, Catherine Kudlick, a professor who is partially sighted and who is a superstar in the academic world of disability studies--you can read her insightful essay on blind boot camp to get a sense of her thoughtfulness about blindness and gender.

Cathy and I found ourselves at the conference primarily because she is chairing my university's new steering committee on electronic accessibility, a committee on which I sit and for which I chair the teaching and learning subcommittee. In hopes of learning where best to invest our resources, the campus's Information and Educational Technology division is investing a good deal of thought and energy into researching what's going on elsewhere in promoting universal access on college and university campuses.

I have to admit that, as someone whose decrease in vision can be fixed with a simple pair of glasses or contacts and as someone who is not current on the lingo in either disability studies or the various communities of people with disabilities, I was a bit nervous about attending the conference. Intensely curious and wanting to learn more, but nervous. (I soon learned that with Cathy as my very forgiving guide, I really had no need to worry. I was especially delighted when she took me to a fascinating discussion at a sci-fi literary salon for the blind.)

We spent two days at the conference, the first entirely on our feet as we explored four huge ballrooms of vendors selling technologies designed for people with disabilities ranging from dyslexia to autism to paralysis to blindness. I'm reasonably tech savvy, and knowing about all the cool mainstream technologies out there as well as believing there had to be a huge market for some of these assistive technologies, I was ready to be blown away by the awesomeness of various devices.

But: not so much with the awesomeness. The technology--and I know I'm not the first to note this, but it bears repeating--was infantilizing. It wasn't always clear to me which technologies were geared toward children and which were for adults. Pictographs looked like they came out of children's books. Devices featured high-contrast primary colors that looked more at home, in my experience, on babies' toys than on any device an adult would want to be seen with, even if the devices' primary market seemed to me to be people who were completely blind. Many of the devices for the blind seemed oversized. In addition, many vendors offered only mild variations on an unimaginative theme. As we made our way through the exhibition halls, I became increasingly jaded and--I admit--a bit sarcastic.

The next day, while having coffee with Cathy and a fabulous colleague to whom she had introduced me the night before, I couldn't help but comment. They asked me what I thought about what I'd seen and heard, and I described a series of particularly large-buttoned, plastic devices, each of which hung at the waist from a nylon shoulder strap. They looked like little accordions. I said I found the photos on the printed advertising materials particularly frustrating; to me they sent the message, "I'm blind! I can't do anything but stand on a corner and play this accordion!" To my relief, my reaction elicited knowing chuckles from my companions.

That day, we attended conference sessions by universities that had made greater strides in universal design and access than our institution has. I heard some very inspiring and interesting ideas from universities on the forefront of making learning accessible to all students.

For example, advocates of universal design at the University of Texas at Austin have not only provided guidelines on making websites accessible regardless of whether they use HTML or rich media, but have made available a dashboard through which campus webmasters can compare their sites' accessibility with others on campus. UTA has encouraged a spirit of competition among the webmasters and has offered webmasters scholarships to AccessU, Knowbility’s annual training institute that aims to make the web empowering for all people.

San José State University also has made a concerted effort at improving the accessibility of instructional materials. The Center for Faculty Development hosts faculty in residence specializing in the accessibility of instructional materials and offers a ton of resources on making instructional materials accessible. Faculty can, for example, learn how to create a PDF that is readable by text-to-voice software.

As a teaching consultant at my university, I must admit I'm dreading the day when the university system mandates universal design. Don't get me wrong--I want the university to embrace universal design, but I'm not looking forward to working with faculty who see overhauling their learning materials as just one. more. thing. they have to do.

Thanks to Cathy's chairing of the campus's electronic accessibility committee, we're taking a different approach. With faculty, we're trying to avoid the language of mandates and compliance and liability and instead talk about opportunities and social justice. What new opportunities open up for all students when we explicitly consider students with disabilities in our course planning, and when we think less about "accommodating" those students than we do about changing the ways we teach to better challenge all students?

What such challenges may look like, I'm still trying to figure out. For example, I'm also working on a visual literacy initiative at my university. Along with another mentor of mine, Professor of Education and visual sociologist Jon Wagner, I'm now thinking about the intersection of universal design principles with the campus's recent incorporation of visual literacy into its general education requirements. Should the university be thinking about multimodal and multimedia literacies instead of focusing on literacies that rely on one sense? And shouldn't all students be developing aural literacies as well as visual ones?

There are a kajillion resources on universal design, but based on my recent research, I recommend these:

Knowbility's blog addresses technology issues as wide-ranging as Facebook's recent redesign, an accessible version of Twitter, and universal design in voting.

Glenda Sims (the goodwitch), "the self-appointed web standards evangelist and accessibility goddess" at the University of Texas at Austin--who also was one of the speakers at the conference--writes about the twin frustration and satisfaction of educating software vendors about accessibility.

Visit As Your World Changes, where the blogger is adjusting to vision loss "with class, using technology."

AccessibleWorld.org "seeks to educate the general public, the disabled community and the professionals who serve them by providing highly relevant information about new products, services, and training opportunities designed specifically to eliminate geographic and access barriers that adversely affect them."

Finally, my favorite find of this evening is Aimee Mullins's latest TED talk, in which she talks about prosthetics as delivery mechanisms for superpowers (or super fashions) rather than as markers of disability. Definitely listen for her comments on Pamela Anderson's prosthetics and Mullins's ability to "grow" from 5'8" to 6'1". (And if you're into shoes, you'll definitely dig the prosthetics Mullins showcases during the talk.)

What are your thoughts on accessibility in higher ed?

Extreme sheep LED art

Honestly, I don't care if this footage is real or doctored. I'm going to pretend it's authentic and declare it to be AWESOME.

Using clickers in the university classroom

Recently "clickers"--a remote control-like personal response system universities are adopting in droves--have (quite literally) made the news. NPR ran a story on them, and The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only) provided an analysis of clicker economics and a critique of their use. (If you don't have a Chronicle subscription, Margaret Soltan of University Diaries provides the article in its entirety.)

So: Clickers--good or evil? That seems to be the question everyone is asking, and in many ways it's an annoying question. On the one hand, I think it's important to ask if clickers are useful in the first place. On the other hand, since they are being widely adopted, it's clear many faculty do find them useful in one way or another. The question then becomes, at least for teaching consultants like myself, "How can we ensure clickers are being used in a way that's pedagogically sound?" In particular, how might clickers improve students' experience in large-enrollment courses?

Near the end of the Chronicle article, Michael Bugeja writes,

I am still wary of clickers, and I asked professors in my unit if they were using them.

Jay Newell, who teaches advertising, consulted with his student advisory committee about using clickers in his large class. The students were against clickers, he observed: "One said that she and her friends would slow down lectures by inputting incorrect answers to poll questions. Another said that it was not unusual to have one student bring multiple clickers as a favor to friends in classes in which clicker responses were used to award credit."

I was intrigued that Newell had consulted with students and had created an advisory committee, an idea recommended by the same center for excellence in learning and teaching whose e-mail message triggered this essay.

And that's the moral of the story. Institutions have much to learn from students about the cost and effectiveness of technology. Chief information officers need to be consulted before departments invest in expensive for-profit consumer technologies. Professors need to realize that technology comes at a price, even when advertised as "free." Finally, administrators need to double their efforts at cost containment, demanding assessment before investment, especially in schemes that bypass mandated accountability standards.

Laura Blankenship (AKA Geeky Mom, whom I seem to be citing a lot these days) has a post about the importance of cost-benefit analysis in adopting new technologies to support teaching and learning.

I agree with both Bugeja and Blankenship: all parties at a university--students, faculty, IT folks, teaching centers, and administrators--must collaborate in selecting the best technologies for students. Too frequently, this isn't the case.

The best practices, it seems to me, for adopting clickers at a university include*:

• Having academic technology services (or IT or whatever department is in charge of these things at your institution) set up classroom pilots of clicker systems from several different vendors.


• Selecting from among these many vendors the clicker system that is most flexible, is platform agnostic (e.g. works on both Macs and PCs), and is inexpensive for students. This clicker system, and only this clicker system, would then be made available through the campus bookstore.


• Working with vendors to provide students with the best possible deal. In the best-case scenario, students would pay once for a clicker that they could use throughout their college years, and then sell it back (assuming the technology is still current) at similar buyback rates for textbooks (best case scenario: the bookstore pays 50% of the clicker's original cost to buy it back from the student). Students would not pay per-class or per-term for clicker service; there would only be the one-time purchase cost.


• Avoiding costly installation of clicker technology in classrooms. Instead, select a system that allows instructors to carry around a small box-type receiver that can be plugged into their laptops and easily receive feedback from student clickers, even if the clickers aren't in a direct line of sight from the box.


• Ensuring that faculty in adjacent classrooms could use clickers without interfering with one another's sessions. Clicker systems should be multichannel. If memory serves, the system at my university offers 13 simultaneous channels in a concentrated area.


• Training faculty on the systems prior to the start of the academic term, and having quick-response teams of academic technology experts who could be in a classroom within three minutes. Again, this is the goal of classroom technology support folks at my university, and it's larger than 5,000 acres, so I don't want to hear any complaining from people on 300-acre campuses. :)


• Coordinating with the campus teaching center and any other relevant campus units (e.g. the student disabilities center) to ensure the best possible learning outcomes for clickers. This means not just holding workshops--which faculty tend to be loath to attend, in my opinion--but finding out from the bookstore who has ordered clicker systems and then working proactively with those faculty to ensure they are implementing clickers in a meaningful way.

Which begs the question: Is there a meaningful way to use clickers?

I'm no booster for clickers, particularly when I suspect they're being used as a substitute for true student engagement and interaction. Yet in very large enrollment classes--of more than 100 students, say--clickers can provide instructors with a way of gauging what students are learning.

For example, say an instructor asks a question of a large class and provides three possible answers (A, B, and C). She then asks students to raise their hands if they believe A is the correct answer, then B, then C. Inevitably, large numbers of students aren't raising their hands because they either aren't paying attention or, more likely in my experience, they worry about embarrassing themselves by raising their hands for an incorrect answer. With clickers, students can answer these questions confidentially. Faculty might then more accurately determine what proportion of a class is not understanding what's going on.

Since clicker systems have an option to identify individual students to the instructor, instructors could ask students to "log in" to their clickers for such an exercise. This would encourage even higher participation--particularly if a portion of the course grade was based on participation, which is not usually the case in large lecture courses. In my opinion, it's not wise to grade student responses to on-the-fly questions like the example given in the previous paragraph, but recording individual student responses would help faculty and teaching assistants identify students who regularly respond with incorrect answers and target them for additional, small-group assistance.

I have also heard of professors asking students to individually punch in an answer--A, B, C, D, or E, for example--then confer with their fellow students before answering the question a second time. Such a practice encourages students to help one another and reinforces student learning by having students justify their answers, explain how they arrived at their answers, and possibly even teach one another a concept. It also may reinforce for the faculty member the importance of giving students time to engage with and learn from one another.

I'm not sure those who have written about clickers recently have considered the promise of this technology in very large enrollment classes. For example, Margaret Soltan dismisses them with this comment:

Once again we take note of the way an alliance of commercial interests and slothful professors creates a shitty, expensive education for American students.

Certainly there are many instances--and probably even a majority of them--where clickers are not implemented thoughtfully. That's why it's important that the best practices I outline above are followed.

I also agree wholeheartedly with Historiann's assessment:

I can’t help thinking that all of the problems teachers may experience with not knowing if students are getting anything out of lectures could be solved by the old-fashioned technology used by top-notch prep schools and liberal arts colleges throughout history: classes small enough (say, up to 40) where professors know the students’ names and can gauge student interest and throw out provocative questions to keep student attention.

Amen. The real solution to the problem of large-enrollment courses would be to stop the factory farming of undergraduates. At my university we now have science courses of more than 900 students. That's not just insane; it's criminal. However, as a staff member of a teaching center, I can make my displeasure with that system known, and I can help interested faculty undertake research on the learning outcomes of large-enrollment classes versus seminars, but in the end the juggernaut of the university will bowl over those of us who try to stand in its way. After all, large classes give faculty more time for research (although I've found that adjuncts teach these large introductory classes much of the time, and adjuncts typically aren't required to undertake research), and large classes are very cost-effective, as they require only one faculty member and a small army of poorly paid TAs or readers rather than a very large department of more highly paid professors ready to meet with students in more intimate settings.

Until the day when large universities collapse under their own weight and those of us who care can say "I told you so," we're stuck with improvising solutions. And I think, used thoughtfully, that clickers provide some small hope of improving students' motivation and ability to learn.

*I owe a debt of gratitude to my local clicker guru, Robert Ralston of the University of California, Davis, who has spent years figuring out how these systems work, and who has reminded me of their benefits and liabilities on many an occasion.

Experimentation: "The Two Trees"

William Butler Yeats's poem "The Two Trees" is among my favorites. Tonight I was playing around in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet, and I decided to try a little experiment. The results are below. This very brief project represents my first time using iMovie for anything but capturing video from the built-in camera on my laptop. I used GarageBand to record the voiceover, which comprises the first four lines of Yeats's poem.

It's rough, but now I've taught myself the first steps in one form of digital storytelling. Yay!

I heart Wacom

This evening I've been alternating coloring Wall-E posters with Lucas and playing with my Wacom tablet. Confession: I've had the tablet for 7 months. It's just been sitting on my desk unused, which is NOT COOL, considering I asked for it as a joint birthday gift from Mr. Trillwing and my parents.

Anyhoo, tonight I installed the driver and hooked it up for the first time, and may I just say I am in love?

Here's my first attempt at an illustration. It's still rough, and I drew it off the top of my head instead of looking at a photo of a horse, so please excuse the clutziness of it. But I just wanted to share because I love this technology--I recommend it to anyone who likes to sketch.

(click to embiggen)

Playing with a widget: edupunk

Finally updated the blogroll

Please let me know of errors and omissions. Leave your new or updated link in the comments--don't be shy! :)

Thoughts on Twitter snark, deconstruction, and a pedagogy

At the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference in San Antonio last week, there was an amazing Twitter back channel on which people reported on highlights of the sessions they were attending, critiqued ideas presented in those sessions, and engaged in conversations about conference content. It was, I thought, a delightful addition to the conference.

However, in the final conference session, a plenary featuring Lulu CEO Bob Young, the Twittering turned, in the minds of some people, a bit vicious. My impression of the Twitter stream:

• We began tweeting in disbelief that the speaker was so tone-deaf to his audience.
• We ramped up the snark and began giggling because wow, was this guy ever wrong about his audience.
• We settled into a collective sobriety and depression because Young clearly had been--in the words of one participant--scarred by his teachers and even by librarians, and because we sensed the profound disconnect between industry and academia

Others' reactions
Gardner Campbell has written an excellent post in which he expresses his chagrin in participating in this Twittering, but in which he also explains how (and perhaps why) Young went awry in his talk.

Gardner writes,

But there’s one other thing to note here. A keynote speaker has an enormous responsibility. At these moments, the entire conference comes to a point of focus on one speaker, one set of ideas, one address. ELI 2008 was full of enormously talented speakers, and any of the featured speakers would have been a much better closing keynote than Bob Young was, though I’m sure no one on the program committee had any idea Young would do what he did. But back to the point. Time slots on a program are always precious, especially when so many wonderful ideas and speakers are in circulation. I think we all felt an enormous wave of disappointment (this comment [from Barbara Sawhill] eloquently describes the feeling) that an extraordinary opportunity had been discarded by a speaker who seemed to have no sense at all of the gift he had been given. The program committee, acting on our behalf, gave him a treasure, a great privilege, and to him it appeared to be no occasion at all–nothing to rise to, nothing to answer, nothing to value. Instead, we got jokes about his inadequate speaker’s fee and the relative IQs of his various audiences.

Jim Groom, who wasn't attending the conference, but who was attending to its Twitter stream, shared these thoughts about the plenary tweets:

From my vantage point, receiving all these reactions second-hand via twitter offered a fascinating look into something other than what was being said at the podium, or the vicarious experience of “being there.” What it suggested to me was how the community thinks about what is being said. To hear a large number of people (all of whom I respect and trust) in my network respond to ideas they neither agree with nor, at times, can tolerate was both unbelievably entertaining and fascinating all at once.

As Kieramc (a fellow twitter-ite who was not at the event) tweeted: “This may be my fave ELI session this year.” I couldn’t agree with her more! It was a blast from the bleachers, in part because I didn’t have to sit (or is it suffer) through this talk, but also because the experience suggests a real pulse within the network. This was a moment of cognitive crisis in our “collective intelligences” which had immediate reverberations in the network (or in this case twitter — sorry if I am using Network a bit loosely here).

Collean Carmean was considerably more disappointed with the direction of the plenary tweets:

I was truly jazzed by the sense of long-distance ‘being there’ via Twitter energy during the ELI experience the last few days. Smart, funny, deep, interesting live back channel and longed-for summaries of fun, food, ideas that I missed.

Then, a LULU of a shift. I checked in yesterday and was stunned by the back-channel backlash, and the…harshness…of the Twitters. So stunned I stepped away from my machine.

Twitter changed for me in that moment. It lost its luster as a stream of consciousness with my connections and left me disconnected. Someone posted that he felt ’strange and estranged’ but he was there, and so had a context. I was just sad.

My take
If we were out for blood, as some people seem to be implying, I'm wondering how much of the incident was expressing our distaste for bad speakers, and how much of it might be traced back to our training as (for many of us) humanities scholars. My own experience in graduate programs in English and cultural studies consisted in many cases of taking a text and tearing it apart (or, worse, as was more common in cultural studies: reading a secondary text that was savaging a primary text, without bothering to read the primary text). And that's what was happening in many ways during Young's talk. We were actively deconstructing the text he was creating--his narratives of his education, as well as his beliefs about how academics view their students--and a lot of that deconstruction, in part because it was taking place in 140-character sound bites, manifested itself in snark.

Of course, this raises a bigger issue: Are we training our students to be similarly snarky, to deconstruct knowledge* rather than to construct it? Is the kind of savage deconstruction we see today in many English and various humanities "studies" programs a necessary part of humanities training? This kind of training--which thank God I didn't get until grad school, as my undergrad institution was much more traditionally liberal artsy--has definitely affected the way I see the world. It's made me more cynical and suspicious about U.S. culture in general, but also about the discipline in which I received my Ph.D.--cultural studies. I have observed that many cultural studies TAs here are more likely to try to have content-based consciousness-raising sessions in their classes than try to teach cognitive skills. I'm not the only one locally to have made this observation.

Which brings me to American studies. I love teaching American studies because it's one of those disciplines that, when taught well, takes a more holistic approach to culture. It asks what phenomena unite or divide Americans, rather than criticize the Americans themselves for destroying cultures worldwide. (Don't get me wrong--the U.S. deserves plenty of blame for corporate imperialism, but I like the American studies approach because it avoids alienating conservative and moderate students in a never-ending blame game of cynicism and suspicion.)

So when someone posts on Twitter that "There's obviously something interesting about his experience, but he doesn't seem to have prepared to share it with us," that's a fine critique. In looking up this Tweet, I remembered it as "he doesn't seem to be" (rather than have) "prepared to share it with us." This, to me, is a significant statement. Whence comes this inability to share? The American studies scholar in me asks about that gap in communication--what is this corporate leader holding back from academics, and why? What is it about his experience that makes him come across as recalcitrant or even obnoxious? What assumptions is he making about academics, and why? I think the Twitter stream was asking those questions, just in ways that are less articulate (but considerably wittier). Much of what we were doing may in the moment have been a slapdash, on-the-fly close reading of Young's talk, but looking back at the Tweets allows us to continue conversations on bigger issues.

So yay for Twitter, and thanks to those who participated in the banter during Young's talk. If only we could always keep our students so engaged. Maybe the next time I teach, I'll have the class's Twitter stream projected on the back wall (as someone recommended we ought to do for Young's talk).

* What do I mean by deconstruction? I'm not necessarily talking about Deconstruction with a capital "D." As it's practiced in the disciplines with which I'm familiar, deconstruction means (in practice, if not always in theory) taking "text" A and running it through filter B (e.g. feminist theory, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger) in order to see what kind of hamburger gets produced. In my opinion, it's not particularly imaginative or generative.

Who's Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0

Check out the resources (and fabulous multimedia presentations!) from our ELI 2008 conference.

Conferencing with ed tech folks: what's hot and what's not

(cross-posted at BlogHer)

Blog conversations, Twitter, and wet t-shirts, oh my!

Those were just some of the highlights of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) annual conference, which concluded today. Overall, the conference was as all conferences seem to be: some useful sessions, some not so much--but terrific camaraderie and first-rate opportunities for networking with higher ed faculty, faculty development specialists, and ed tech folks from around the world.

And yes, you did read that correctly: I said "wet t-shirts." Allow me to explain. . .

How not to talk to higher ed professionals
If there's one thing I can tell you about faculty, it's that we have little patience for speakers who are tone deaf to the needs and concerns of their audience. We are, after all, people who are committed to research. So, for example, if you're speaking to a room that's at least 50% women--and savvy, intelligent women at that--you probably shouldn't include a "funny" photo of a faceless woman having her bra removed or a reference to "wet tee-shirts.com." Unless, that is, you want me to stand up in front of 75-100 people and ask you why all your examples of successful folks in the conative domain (e.g. striving, will, desire) were male adventurers (male astronauts, male pilots--and oh yeah, Christa McAuliffe, who died while striving), while at the same time you included references to women's bodies instead of their minds. And when you tell me gender doesn't matter in this conative domain after you gave gendered (male) example after gendered (male) example, you can forgive me for not being satisfied with your answer. (I'm gratified to all the folks--men and women--who approached me after your session to thank me for asking that question and continued the conversation.)

Also: Even if you are a jaded Baby Boomer professor, you're probably going to lose your audience of educators and educational advocates when you say things like, "We need to stop telling young people they can be anything they want." That's not giving us tough talk. That's showing that, again, you don't get the gender (and race and class) thing.

And if you're going to talk to us about educational publishing in the 21st century, you probably shouldn't use phrases like "damned idiot students." Unless, that is, you want the conference cool kids on the Twitter back channel to ramp up the snark to unprecedented levels. We went from initial disbelief to giggles to abject depression within 45 minutes. Some representative samples:

"I can get published on the Internet, yayyyyy!"

"I got a long tail for you right here pal."

"I can see the headlines now: 'Red Hat Co-founder Stoned at Ed Conference' Twitter stream under investigation."

"There's obviously something interesting about his experience, but he doesn't seem to have prepared to share it with us."

"I believe this man was scarred by this teachers. Badly scarred."

Laura Blankenship hit the nail on the head with her blog post about the divided audience at ELI. Admittedly, even though we all see ourselves as active learners and we tend to be more curious about technology than your average Jane on the street, we're a tough crowd because, as Laura points out,

I think a conference like this tries to strike a balance between reaching those who are unaware or only vaguely aware of the bleeding edge and those who are standing right on it.

In short, at ELI you're speaking to two very different audiences at once. We all care about pedagogy and technology, but we're at different places in our journeys.

How to talk to folks in higher ed
Engage us with ideas. Tell us about your project or program or research, but also let us talk. (Tip: letting us speak makes it harder for us to Twitter about your presentation.) Most of the conference sessions I attended gave participants time to chat with one another about what's going on at our home institutions. A+ to those panelists.

At the risk of seeming self-promoting, I wanted to highlight a session in which I was a co-presenter: "Who's Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0." The session description asked a difficult question:

Web 2.0 tools have the power to transform education. Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change? Join us to face this fear together in a multimedia, interactive miniplay.

You can view the video and Voicethread presentations created for the session by bloggers Barbara Sawhill, Barbara Ganley, Martha Burtis, Laura Blankenship, and me. Following a viewing of the videos, we led participants through a brainstorming exercise. The audience participants generated many fabulous solutions for helping faculty, students, and IT staff overcome their anxieties about the collaborative web. Solutions ranged from offering one-on-one tutoring of faculty in tech tools to, er, ending nationalism. Laura provides a full list of the proposed solutions on her blog. (Thanks to all who participated--especially since our session was concurrent with a presentation by Michael Wesch of "The Machine is Us/ing Us" fame.)

What made this session a success was not only the incredible expertise and insight of my co-presenters, but also the quality of audience participation. If you know your audience, you can initiate lively conversations that extend well beyond the session's time slot.

This session also modeled the kind of connections educators can make by blogging. Many attendees were shocked--shocked, I tell you!--that we hail from five different, geographically dispersed colleges and universities. We were asked how we met, and we all said, "We blog!" (In fact, I first met the Barbaras and Laura at BlogHer 2006.) Like the conference's unofficial Twitter stream that provided an additional venue for commentary and critique, blogging was a unifying thread among many of the conference's most provocative and revolutionary thinkers--men and women alike.

My questions for you
How do you confront speakers who incorporate sexist, racist, or classist representations into their presentations, or who make assumptions that you find asinine? Do you prefer to address the issue in public on the spot, speak privately with the presenter following his or her talk, and/or blog about it?

How can we make the more revolutionary, provocative voices heard at conferences in industries (like education) that can be slow to adapt to changes of all kinds?

tag: ELIAnnual08

Henry Jenkins keynote, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative

New Media Literacies Project

has been producing a documentary about the Wikipedia movement

Wikipedia is one of the major debates of the relationship of new learning technologies to the classroom over the past few years. Debates, explorations of how knowledge is being created and processed.

History department at Middlebury College in 2006 declared that Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation in papers.



Some skepticism is healthy. Students shouldn't be citing encyclopedias. After all, Middlebury didn't say not to look at Wikipedia at all. Might as well say "Don't listen to rock and roll."

Goal today is not to say whether Wikipedia is good or bad, but to talk about how to work with our students regarding thinking critically about knowledge, sources.

With Wikipedia, we have the opportunity to expose kids to how knowledge is circulated and evaluated.

Can we understand the kinds of learning that is taking place as kids gather online in communities, as gamers, etc. Can we use that knowledge to help museums, libraries, etc. integrate learning into their online presences?

Turn around dialogue that takes place around technology and youth. Circulates too much around fear.

Open access digital media and learning books available here.

Kids need to be able to ercognize manipulation, propaganda, and to assimilate ethical values--Jonathon Fanton, MacArthur Foundation president, paraphrased.

It's about a new kind of literacy, not just substituting new terms for old ones. How do we involve kids, parents, teachers. What do kids need beyond reading and writing--even though reading and writing are essential to what we're talking about. Other ways of processing knowledge.

Participatory culture:
- low barriers to expression and civic engagement
- strong support for creating and sharing
- informal mentorship
- contributions matter
- social connection between members

Adults can participate online, albeit in less hierarchical ways than they do in families, schools, elsewhere offline. Adults (digital immigrants) need to be challenged to participate with kids (digital natives).

New Media Literacies:

• social skills, cultural competencies
• skills for participation, not just consumption
• take seriously children's and youths' own cutural lives
• not simply products of media technologies but also social and cultural practices that grow up around those technologies
• unevenly distributed among the digital natives
• shaped through interactions between children and adults at all stages
• require a shift from a focus on media effects to media ethics
• Come into play offline as well as online
• Build on existing framework of literacy and research skills
• Suggest the importance of integrating media literacy across the curricuum
• Need to be fostered through schools, after school programs, public instituions, churchs, parents, etc.

Three core challenges:

The participation gap: the unequal access of youth to opportunities, experiences, skills and knowledge that will prepare them for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

The transparency problem: the challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways media shape our perceptions of the world. Need to think critically about games as well as textbooks. Games, maps, graphs, dioramas misrepresent as well as represent.

The ethics challenge: the breakdown of traditional forms of professional trainng and socialization which might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants. Don't pretend problems don't exist, but to engage in real potentials of new media, not to fear them. Make informed, reasonable decisions--kids need to know how to do that.

Skills:

Collective intelligence: ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliabiltiy and credibility of different information sources

Networking

Negotiation



The encyclopedia analogy to Wikipedia. Encyclopedia analogy also distorts because it suggests Wikipedia is something we consume, not something we do. Suggests Wikipedia is like finished book on a shelf.

Video: Wikipedia is democratizing knowledge. Bulk of human knowledge produced by amateurs who pursued knowledge for the love of what they were doing. Darwin didn't hold an academic appointment.

Wikipedia reminds us what's lacking in the tradtional media we take for granted: talk with authors, history of revisions/drafts.

Rather than complaining about Wikipedia inaccuracies, change the errors yourself.

How knowledge is connected together by links: high and low culture, past and present, cross-disciplinary. Example: link path from Shakespeare to Apollo Space Program is only 5 links. Emphasizes interconnectedness of content.

What holds a collective knowledge together is the social nature of its creation, not its ownership.

Expert paradigm vs. collective intelligence model. Debates about rules are part of process of the latter. Former have formal education, are hierarchial and expect rules-based creation of knowledge, dialogue about it.

Who gets to be an expert?

coach/player
librarian/research
actor/director
car mechanic/race care driuver
architect/construction worker
biologist/nurse

Many ways to know an object or field.

Collective intelligence is becoming a deeper and deeper aspect of our cuture: see fan culture surrounding Lost as fans try to puzzle out what's going on.

Wikipedia has a code of conduct that emphasizes respect. Different groups must work through competiting perspectives in order to construct a shared resource.

In a traditional encyclopedia, # of words indicates relative importance of topics. On Wikipedia, that doesn't hold true. (e.g. entries on Asimov vs. Woodrow Wilson)

ELIAnnual08

Scylla or Charybdis: An allegory for ed tech

In Book XII of The Odyssey, the hero-wanderer Odysseus must navigate his ship through a dangerous, narrow strait. On one side sits the many-headed hydra Scylla, and on the other is the omnivorous whirlpool Charybdis. Odysseus opts to travel closer to Scylla, even though he knows he will lose some of his crew to her many jaws, because he does not want to risk the entire ship by navigating closer to the whirlpool.


Scylla and Charybdis serve as an excellent metaphor of the landscape of instructional technology at many colleges and universities today. Many in IT would like to put in place a system that serves all faculty needs, a single portal that allows faculty to order books, manage instructional grants, organize personal image collections, and set up a gradebook and submit grades, as well as includes all the tools people have come to expect from a course management system: a chat room, discussion forum, blog platform, podcast service, file sharing, and more. The problem from the user perspective is that while a single system may offer many tools, it typically offers only one form of each tool: one blogging platform, one type of discussion forum, one chat room tool. And because the focus is often on integration of these tools into the language of the larger system rather than on developing top-notch tools, these individual tools themselves may be inferior to those available freely elsewhere online. For example, in my opinion the blogging platform in Sakai doesn't even deserve to be called a blog.

On the other side of the straits of ed tech waits the hydra of the “small pieces loosely joined” approach. From the perspective of the IT folks, faculty members who choose to use a hand-picked selection of tools outside the university-provided course management system—e.g. WordPress, Flickr, del.icio.us, Bloglines, YouTube—are courting disaster because they're using platforms that are not officially supported by the campus IT help desk. While some faculty are excited about the opportunity to try out new tools, the more technophobic or time-pressed among them feel overwhelmed by the huge variety of new media available to them; they don't know where to begin in selecting tools.

As a teaching consultant for my university, my fear is that faculty will be sucked unwittingly into the maw of Charybdis without realizing the limitations and liabilities of such a system. They'll put technology before pedagogy simply because someone has told them they must use the system. Instead, I want to encourage faculty to try new tools outside the CMS--but I don't want to become their tech support guru simply by virtue of being the one who recommended, say, WordPress to them.

It's not a coincidence that I've chosen Odysseus's harrowing trial by hydra and vortex as my metaphor for technological adoption at the university. Both the myth and the technology have a lot to do with fear. Fear on the part of technological and pedagogical support staff of not being able to adequately support faculty. Fear, felt by both IT staff and faculty, of fragmentation, of systems not talking to one another, or of a course's "required" content falling in the cracks between technologies. Fear of letting students create and share more of a course's content--and thereby set the tenor of the course--than ever before. Fear felt by faculty that their course content will be monitored if they place everything into the CMS. From students and faculty, we also get fear in the form of impostor syndrome: everyone is going to learn that I'm an idiot, that I can't figure out the technology, or I'll post something stupid that everyone will find laughable, and I won't be able to fix it.

This list of anxieties suggests that the technophobia floating on the surface of these concerns is a proxy for deeper pedagogical and administrative fears. Identifying those actual fears and anxieties should be job #1; only after we have figured out what ails us can we participate in thoughtful teaching and learning. (Professor, heal thyself.)

The academic process, whether it be teaching or learning, asks us to grapple with-- and even requires that we remain a bit anxious about--the unfamiliar and unknown. It's this mixture of curiosity about and commitment to our disciplines' areas of inquiry that drew many of us to academia in the first place. Most of us jump courageously into the research breach, familiarize ourselves with new subjects, and answer unresolved questions and dilemmas.

Finding the technology that best improves our students' ability to learn is a similar process. It requires a good deal of curiosity: in the best case scenario we audition multiple tools. We should be less interested in the technical details of the software and more curious about its pedagogical applications. If you're trying to decide whether to use ARTstor or Flickr to share images for your course, you'll need to consider, for example, issues of copyright, image resolution, and the user community. On the surface, these seem to be technical details, but they're really pedagogical questions: What images can I share online with my student within (or despite) copyright laws? Will my students be uploading original images, collecting existing images, or modifying images? Will we be soliciting comments or other participation from people who aren't members of the course? If so, what kind of access does the public have to this tool? In how much detail will I require my students to study or analyze the images? Will students need to organize the images themselves? Will they need to be able to highlight and comment upon specific parts of the images? Do I want students to socially tag the images? These questions get at the levels and kinds of collaboration and intellectual and creative production in which we want students to engage.

The process of technology selection requires as well the patience and commitment to try out a tool ourselves and then--gasp!--unleash it on our students, who will use platforms and software and systems in ways that aren't entirely under our control. But the best teaching involves relinquishing control in ways that allow your students to take responsibility for their learning, to consider, research, analyze, and discover--in short, to make new and meaningful connections, to synthesize course material with their experiences.

In the end, the question--Scylla or Charybdis--is, of course, a false dichotomy. There are plenty of other choices--not to use technology at all, to use various tools as well as your campus's CMS, to ask your students to present their completed projects using the tools they find most useful within the context of their work. While it's a good idea to consult with pedagogically-oriented IT staff at your institution, you and your students--and not the IT folks--need to make the final decision as to what tools most improve your students' ability to learn.

Got Fear 2.0?

If so, and you're in higher ed, we want to hear about it for an upcoming presentation at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference. You can e-mail your anxieties about using Web 2.0 technologies in education directly to me at trillwing at gmail dot com.

In addition, if you find (or author) a relevant blog post or web page, we'd love for you to draw our attention to it by tagging it "eli08fear" in del.icio.us. Pages tagged thusly are being aggregated on the "Got Fear?" blog created by the talented Martha Burtis. You should definitely go check out "Got Fear?" for some interesting reading.

Should profs podcast?

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)

This afternoon I sat in on a presentation by a vendor that supplies hardware and software that records college and university instructors' lectures. The software produces not only podcasts, but also enhanced podcasts (with slides) and videocasts. The packages the vendor offers come with many bells and whistles, and I was impressed that one of the reps has a Ph.D. in educational technology and offered to help the institution collect and analyze data on any services the university purchased.

At the same time, I've been working with some absolutely brilliant women bloggers on a presentation for the upcoming EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference. Our presentation abstract states, "Web 2.0 tools have the power to transform education. Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change?"

My current fear and anxiety center around podcasts in higher education. And I'm not sure how to tackle it in ways that effect real change.

Why fear podcasting?

Why should I fear podcasting? After all, podcasts allow students to access lectures when they need them. If they learn best in the late evening, then why shouldn't they be able to watch a lecture after the instructor herself has gone to bed? Studies indicate that the availability of podcasts doesn't affect course attendance--students who would usually skip class still skip. In fact, it may be the most studious class participants who access the podcasts--they can review lecture material and fill in any gaps in their notes. In addition, students who are not fully proficient in the language of instruction can watch or listen to the lectures again to try to better translate sections they didn't understand in class.

As the vendors in today's presentation pointed out, some universities are making their faculty members' lectures available to the public, completely free of charge. One vendor rep talked quite a bit about building a university's brand through publicly accessible podcasts. Indeed, in the case of land grant universities, the institutions have a mandate to perform outreach to the public, and podcasts are a relatively inexpensive way to do so.

Plus, asking professors to videocast their lectures can make them better teachers. After all, the university teaching resources center where I work offers to videotape faculty in the classroom; we then sit down with each instructor to watch the videotape and consult with her about her teaching. If faculty watched their own videocasts, they could learn a lot about their own lecture style and presentation skills.

Today's college students, the vendors told us, have brains wired differently from ours. Specifically, they apparently don't have the attention span or discipline required to read books. And because they're always multitasking--even during lecture--it makes sense to provide them with a podcast they can review later to catch any details they missed while text messaging one another during class.

Plus, how much would I love to listen to podcasts of faculty at my own alma mater? I learned a lot there, and podcasts would not only help me learn, but also keep me connected to the institution--a bonus for the folks in alumni relations and development when they make their perennial appeals to me to contribute to the annual fund.

Podcasts don't address students' shortcomings as independent learners

Despite all these potential advantages to pod- and videocasting, I'm hesitant to advocate for these technologies in the classroom. I fear they will do more harm than good and will allow universities to cut corners in educating students.

First, I'm sick of hearing about "wired" students. They love cell phones and iPods and sometimes social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, and yes, they always seem to be plugged in to some device or another. But they're not really tech savvy in ways that help them better understand the world in the ways undergraduates should. Most of my students--even seniors at my well-ranked research university--don't know how to use the library's vast electronic databases to undertake research. Nor do they understand how to even begin to search for information. Take, for example, the case of a graduate student in (let's say, for the sake of anonymity) gardening studies at a private university where I teach a seminar in gardening history. She was writing a paper on tulips, and yet into the library's search engine she typed "gardens." The entire library specializes in gardens, but it never occurred to her, until I pointed it out, that she might search for "tulips." Many of the other students in the seminar had similar difficulties undertaking research, and this is in what might be the nation's top "gardening studies" program.

Many U.S. university students also have difficulty assessing the authority of a web site; they have frequently cited to me something they learned in junior high school--that if a website's URL ends in .gov or .edu, then it's trustworthy. Um, yeah. I showed them government web sites that reflected the Bush administration's stance on sexual health. It takes a lot of hand-holding to get them to learn to analyze and evaluate sources.

And when, at a professor's request, I go into classrooms to interview undergraduate students about their course, students will say things like, "I wish he would stop asking us questions to which he already knows the answer. Just tell us the information. Just tell us the facts."

In other words: Don't make us do the readings. Don't make us think independently or critically.

Why podcasting is problematic

Which is where my beef with podcasting comes in.

Because most lecture rooms aren't wired with additional microphones for students, it's only the professor's contribution to the class that gets recorded. So even if the professor does try to engage the students with questions or small-group activities, the students' contributions to discussion usually won't be captured. And thus if a professor is going to record lectures "successfully"--meaning produce a video or audio recording with decent production values--he or she needs to stand within the view of the camera (some of the more expensive of which, admittedly, have motion detectors that can follow the professor) and lecture the entire time.

Very few students learn well from lectures alone, though unfortunately many students believe they learn well from lectures because they see themselves as vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. At universities such as mine, this "knowledge" comprises the information required to perform well on a multiple-choice test or, more rarely, a paper--and in these students' view, hopefully one that doesn't require too much research outside of class.

By promoting podcasting and videocasting by providing easy-to-use services to professors, we're further reinforcing the idea that lecturing should be the default method of instructional delivery. And since the videocasting program offered by this vendor offers screen captures as well, the system also reinforces the too-frequently heinous use of PowerPoint by faculty who don't understand the cognitive style of PowerPoint.

Even worse: According to one vendor rep, some schools find it too inconvenient to establish an "opt-in" system for faculty who wish to have their lectures recorded, so they record everything that happens in the classroom during every class. And some institutions turn the cameras back on the students during exams to discourage cheating. This level of surveillance--of faculty and of students--disturbs me.

As universities take on ever-increasing numbers of students, they run out of classroom space. Accordingly, classes meet less frequently, and previously-recorded videocasts are being offered as an option to replace the missing class meetings. One student in the vendor's promotional video said that he likes the videocasts because "they're interactive." But they're not, except that the student can rewind or fast-forward through them.

Suggestions for videocasting and podcasting

Despite my reservations about the ways these technologies are being deployed in the classroom, it's clear they are, like course management systems, going to stick around for a while. So I have some suggestions for vendors.

First, if you're going to emphasize "social networking" sites in describing the mentality and learning styles of students today, then please actually include some social aspects in your platform. Allow students to tag video and audio and to search tags across videocasts at their university. If my professor's explanation of iambic pentameter doesn't make sense to me, I'd like to easily find videos of other profs explaining the same concept. If students in those other classes can tag or label their professors' videos by chapter, then I could easily search for other recorded explanations of Shakespeare's favorite meter.

Second, allow faculty and students to easily sample and/or mash up videos from a number of different classes. If I know one of my colleagues gives a killer lecture on the 1893 World's Fair, I want to be able to pull out his five-minute discussion of the enormous Ferris wheel and how its popularity reflects Americans' changing views of technology at the end of the nineteenth century. I could assign a viewing of his explanation as homework, to be completed alongside more traditional academic readings on the Fair. There--I've saved myself probably 10 minutes of stumbling through a Ferris wheel lecture, as well as a couple hours of research for lecture prep--and more importantly, I've gained 10 minutes of quality time with my students, time that I can spend interacting with them instead of talking at them.

Third, let me capture that quality time. Make it easy for me to record students who report back to the class after small-group discussion, without making them come to the front of the class, where they might feel alienated from their group and therefore intimidated.

Fourth, integrate into your platform technologies similar to that used by Voicethread so that students can add their own questions or commentary to lectures, either as audio or as text. Then encourage faculty users of your technology to respond to their newly annotated lectures. In other words, make your software truly interactive and social.

Fifth, work with my institution to come to an agreement that treats my lectures and course activities as my intellectual property and that lets me release the course session recordings under a Creative Commons license. As an adjunct, the last thing I need is to be recorded out of a job when the administration decides that it can reconstitute my course using only my syllabus and videocast lectures, using a low-paid T.A. to issue grades.

Your thoughts?

What do you think of podcasting in education? What are its advantages and liabilities?