Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture

Breaking the Ice with a Collaborative Google Prez!

2012-01-24T14:08:00.000-08:00

This is the first week of my online History of Photography class. I am gently guiding my students into our class which is peppered with emerging technologies including Google Apps, Ning, and VoiceThread. To get them started this week, I have a fun, simple activity that they engage in.

The activity is titled My Favorite Photograph and the objectives are:

To help students get to know their peers on a personal level and start to form the early threads of community.
To examine the subjective and personal nature of the meaning of a photographic image.

I created a presentation using Google Docs (click Create and select Presentation, create the presentation, change the share settings to "Anyone with a link" and "Can edit."). A copy of the presentation is embedded below so you can take a close look at the precise instructions and sample I have provided them with. I used this activity last semester and had zero questions -- so I'm pretty excited about it!

Click here for a larger view.

Here's how it works.

Week 1:

Students click on the link that takes them out to the Google Presentation (exactly like the one you see below but the one they see includes dozens of blank pages, each titled with a student's name).
They read the instructions on slide two and, if necessary, view the video embedded on slide three (which shows the steps for editing the presentation that are explained in text on slide two).
They view the sample slide I created for them.
Then they locate the slide with their name on it and upload their photograph and text (explaining why it's their favorite photograph).

Week 2:

I embed the completed Google Presentation in our Ning network (which is private and open only to my students).
The students are instructed to review the entire presentation, reflect on the images and the justifications the students wrote for why they selected the image. This is really more empowering than it sounds, as students share some very compelling images including loved ones who are away at war, deceased family members, picturesque scenes of nature, artistic masterpieces, and beloved family pets. All in all, they're learning how diverse "photography" can be.
Then before the week is over, they write their first blog post which is an analysis of what they learned from participating in and viewing the collaborative presentation. They are asked to reflect on what they learned about the nature of photographic meaning, as well as to select one photograph from the presentation that stands out in their mind and explain why.
As the blog posts come in, students read each others' posts. Many see their contributions referenced and can read what their image means to their peer, some find a peer who references the same photo they selected, or see an entirely new perspective that they hadn't considered.

Update: Facebook Kills Creative History Project

2012-01-12T10:42:00.000-08:00

I recently posted about a creative use of Facebook by a librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno that embraced social media to make history come alive. Today, the Chronicle reported that Facebook has deleted the accounts representing each of the historical figures due to a violation of its terms of use.

As much as I loved the idea, I completely understand why Facebook enforced its rule that users may not “provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.” There is a common trend among young users of Facebook to create false profiles of real people and post erroneous, inflammatory comments about them. Maintaining integrity in social media is important.

The Chronicle article reports that the pages received thousands of friend requests after the project hit the blogosphere and Twitterverse. So, the good news is that people are interested in learning about historical figures through creative applications of emerging tools. And the article also suggests that creating a Facebook Page about each of the historical figures may fall within the Facebook rules. We'll see.

Experimentation is good. This is how we learn to define the boundaries of our of new digital landscape and understand how we can apply it to learning.

Making History Come to Life with Social Media

2012-01-09T09:40:00.000-08:00

There's a great little article by Nick DeSantis today over at the Wired Campus blog that showcases how Donnelyn Curtis, director of research collections and services at at University of Nevada at Reno, is using Facebook to portray the life of two historical figures.

Using archives and permission from family members, she generated a Facebook profile for Joe McDonnel and Leola Lewis, two former college students who graduated in 1913 and were married not long after. The profiles include photographs of the two attending college events together, like the "sophonore hop," and status updates reflecting their favorite activities and the realities of early 20th century college life.

This historical "role playing" with Facebook is a creative way to melt history into our students' contemporary technological landscape. And I think this is a terrific idea to keep in mind for learning activities too.

Blogging About Dead People

In my History of Photography class, my students each have their own blog in our private class Ning network. Most weeks they write a blog post in response to one of two prompts I assign them. I like to give options, as students respond more favorably to assignments when they have a choice and I really like to contrast the prompts too. While they both will align with the weekly learning objectives, I like offering one creative writing option and one that is more objective.

In an early unit focused on The Popularization and Socialization of the Daguerreotype (1840s), students are pointed to the Daguerreobase website which provides them with a collection of digitized daguerreotypes. They are expected to select one from the database that is either a traditional portrait of one or more people or a death portrait, representing the popular genre of post-mortem portraiture. In their blog post they role play either one of the people sitting for the portrait or the family of the deceased person, usually a child, represented in the post-mortem portrait. Clearly, not all students get intrigued about the idea of writing about a photograph of a dead child but some students are really intrigued about how this phenomenon was considered "normal" in the 19th century; which, of course, is a big part of the "point" of the assignment -- to get students to grasp that the way we value and respond to particular types of phtotographic images is socially constructed. Both posts require students to include factual information about the daguerreotype process, including the studio experience, the exposure time, how it felt wearing mechanical devices that were used to hold a person still during the long exposure time, and the magical feeling of seeing the photographic image unveiled before them.

In our 1880s-90s: Birth of Kodak and the Rise of Snapshots unit, students are given the option to locate two early Kodak ads and analyze them or to locate a historical 'snapshot' and write a blog post that fictitiously role plays the experiences of the person who took to photograph. Both posts require students to include important contextual details, from our learning unit, but each allows students to draw upon their particular styles. Some students l-o-v-e the creative writing options and others feel more comfortable moving into the analytical writing assignment. By sharing their work on their blogs, they have the opportunity to reach out and read what each other has written, increasing their exposure to unique ideas. It's fun to see them comment with encouraging insights the next week.

I have shared both of these blog post activities with Creative Commons licenses and you may view them on the History of Photography page of my blog.

I love engaging students in history through role playing and hope these examples inspire you think about a unique way to use social media to make history come alive for your own students.

Advocating For "Online" Student Success Strategies

2012-01-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

If anyone out there has been following the recent statewide dialogue in California about identifying strategies to improve the success of California community college students, you may be interested in reading the "Draft Recommendations Report" which was recently made public on the Chancellor's website.

I've just begun trudging through it and have been a bit stunned to see that due to "time restraints," the task force did not directly address "distance education" in the report (p. 11). I feel compelled to take a step back right now and point out that the continual lumping of online courses in with our face-to-face courses continues to hurt California community college students. Online classes are unique and the strategies necessary for increasing the success of students in online programs as well as those who enroll in both online and face-to-face coursework needs to be addressed directly.

General communications from the Chancellor's office shared in articles throughout the year with the public typically report important data, like enrollment, in lump figures and the data for distance learning is traditionally reported in a separate report every two years. This reporting process, in my opinion, makes the realities of the impact that online learning is having on the landscape of the CCC system murky, at best. And, as a result, the significant role that online learning plays throughout California's 112 community colleges -- which support 2.6 million students, more than any other system of higher education in the nation -- is not positioned as a statewide priority and the unique needs that online learning brings to the system are often not realized.

The 2011 distance education report can be found here and in it you will see some information that may surprise you. It surprised me and I consider myself pretty well informed about online learning in California. The graph below illustrates the past four years of enrollment changes -- distance education is represented in blue and traditional, face-to-face, classes are represented in red.

As the data illustrated above makes clear, the future of California community colleges is a blended future. Between academic years 2006-2010, traditional enrollments remained relatively stagnant year over year or declined, while online enrollments have soared, even in the face of severe budget cuts.

Lower Success Rates for Online CCC Students
The report also provides evidence that online course success rates trail traditional success rates by 10-12% over the four year period measured in the report (course success defined as the % of enrolled students who end the term with an A, B, or C). This isn't groundbreaking news but is certainly a significant point to consider. These success rates can be improved significantly with the proper strategies but will not be improved if online classes are not understood and valued as unique. Online students who learn in solitude with little to no human connection are at a greater risk of failing -- especially when they're academically challenged and/or their courses are designed with cold, text-based information and void of a sense of relatedness to one's instructor and peers. One of the most important elements of supporting student success online is professional development and faculty training.

An intriguing recent study at Cabrillo College has revealed that online success is even lower for Latino students. The online success gap for Latino students is 44% greater than white students, according to the study. This may be due to the strong role of human-to-human contact and relationships in the latino culture that are undercut by flat online course design. Raymond Kaupp, director of workforce development at Cabrillo argues that the low success rates for online Latino students is likely rooted in Latino attitudes toward education. “Relationships are important to Latino student learning." Community colleges need to foster online community, just as they foster face-to-face community -- within a class, within a department, across a program, and an entire campus. In our mobile, interconnected world driven by video technologies that are now free to low cost, it's a failure to create cold, isolating online learning experiences.

Online classes can be vibrant, dynamic and highly personalized if they're designed effective and integrate pedagogies that support active and constructivist learning through the application of emerging technologies, and faculty are supported to ensure content is accessible to all students. One model that has been proven effective at increasing online student success is the Human Presence Learning Environment used at Santa Barbara Community College.

Warm, High-Touch, Community-Oriented Online Learning
In the teaching I've done over the years for @One's Online Teaching Certification Program, I've seen hundreds of faculty be inspired and amazed at what they can do for their students to create more social, community-oriented learning experiences for their students with a higher sense of social presence -- through the use of technology that would otherwise be absent from their teaching approaches. When the framework embraced for evaluating student success does not view online as a unique entity, these essential pillars of online student success are rendered absent (and they aren't, by any means, the only pillars).

I look forward to watching the lively discussion about the report evolve and am hopeful there will be more advocacy from faculty, staff, students, and the community about the importance of stressing the uniqueness of online learning, the central role it will continue to play in the future of California community colleges and our students.

Is Mobile Learning "Smarter" Learning?

2012-01-04T11:54:00.000-08:00

by TZA on Flickr

Each month, I author a blog post on the GETinsight blog, part of Cisco Systems' GETideas.org network, about a topic relevant to educational innovation.

This month, I am exploring the relationship between cognitive brain research and mobile learning -- not a topic a claim to be an expert on, but certainly one I've been pondering quite a bit lately. From my own mobile learning experiences, I find a much a higher rate of retention and deep learning when I am a mobile learner (usually on a walk or in a quiet place at a time that is convenient for me) versus in a scheduled, face-to-face setting. Mobile learning seems to meet the human brain's craving for multisensory experiences and offers the opportunity to, well, be mobile and engage in physical activity while learning -- which is kind of like sprinkling your brain with vitamin powder.

I hope you'll venture on over to the blog post here, take a gander, and join in on the VoiceThread conversation I've set up. Hope to "see" you soon!

Take me to "Is Mobile Learning Smarter Learning?"

2012: Rainbows & Risks

2011-12-31T17:05:00.000-08:00

Rainbows are incredible to me. I can be in the midst of a crummy day, stuck in gridlock traffic, or taking out a bag of garbage but when I see a rainbow, I stop everything and marvel at it -- I call my kids over, I point them out to strangers nearby, or just sit and stare in solitude. Despite the fact that there is a clear, scientific reason for a rainbow's appearance, to me, when I see one it represents possibilities and puts the world in order for me.

Today as I think about the end of 2011 and the dawn of 2012, I feel much the same way. It's really just another day but tonight we all will celebrate the turn of a clock, the emergence of one more year. If there's one thing I learned in 2011, it's the simple fact that I have no idea what I'll be doing one year from today. Life is strange, unpredictable, quirky, snarky, wretched, beautiful, and marvelous.

Happy new year to you all -- join me in embracing the possibilities 2012 holds for each of us. And as you formulate your resolutions, here's one to consider: take a risk. When you do, it may not turn out the way you want, it may be difficult, or it could be phenomenally fabulous -- regardless, you'll learn more about yourself than you could ever imagine.

Cheers.

Webinar: Integrating VoiceThread Into Your Campus-Wide Teaching Toolkit

2011-12-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

Join Michelle Pacansky-Brock for a conversation with Matt Meyer, Sr. Instructional Designer at Penn State University, to learn about how and why Penn State adopted a sitewide VoiceThread license for all faculty, students and staff. Matt will share the collaborative approach Penn State used to implement and adopt VoiceThread as well as the resulting resources they developed to support faculty. He will also provide advice for other institutions, and answer your questions.

Integrating VoiceThread Into

Your Campus-Wide Teaching Toolkit

Space is limited!

Thursday, January 12th

3pm ET/12pm PT

"I'm Not Stupid!": How Open Ed Video Resources Will Change Education

2011-12-13T13:43:00.000-08:00

For the past month, I have been a lurker in the Khan Academy Google Group. I've been reflecting on the constant flow of comments submitted by "users" of the Khan videos who include a wide mix of people but often are teachers and students. I am inspired but also saddened by the comments from students who share empowering stories of how the videos have enabled them to experience their capabilities to learn. And this experience is the catalyst that sparked my most recent GETInsight blog* post. I hope you enjoy it and feel inspired to leave a comment on the post or in the VoiceThread.

“I’m Not Stupid”: How Open Educational Video Resources Will Change the Future of Education

*The GetInsight blog is an integrated resource of GETideas.org, a community for education leaders. I am a paid consultant for GETideas and write a monthly post about a related topic. Everyone is welcome to participate in the conversation and I hope you'll join us!

Supporting Blind Students with Smartphones?

2011-12-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

David Pogue wrote an article for the NY Times about how Apple's iPhone 4S's AssistiveTouch feature supports blind users more effectively by empowering users to control the phone through complex hand gestures and interactive voice. I don't have an iPhone 4S so it's hard for me to describe these features in detail but this article has me thinking...

As emerging technologies have begun to be used more in college classes for learning activities and increased participation, the concerns about their accessibility for disabled students, particularly those with vision challenges, have escalated. For background, please refer to this article and this article.

With the increasing sales of smartphones, we are seeing more and more emerging tools develop a mobile app. As smartphones continue to become more accessible to blind students, more of them are purchasing the devices. So, it seems that professors should be including mobile support as one of the factors used when evaluating a tool for use in a classroom.

This is really fascinating to me, as I can recall sitting in a presentation at a conference three and a half years ago listening to a Bill Rankin talk about Abilene Christian's mobile initiative, now called ACU Connected. At the time, I was excited about the experimentation at ACU but I remember seeing red accessibility flags pop up in my peripheral vision. But now, the tables seem to be turning and smart phones appear to be transitioning into a gateway to support disabled students, rather than another obstacle. This requires professors and administrators to view and value mobile devices very differently.

Do you know of any colleges or universities who are experimenting with smartphones as an assistive technology device to accommodate students with particular learning challenges? I'd love to hear from you if you do. This is a topic I'm interested in weaving into my forthcoming book. Thank you!

Social Media Meets My Great Grandparents

2011-12-06T09:26:00.000-08:00

Last week I shared a status update on Facebook requesting the help of "friends" to solve a family mystery. I have an old postcard that was written by my great grandmother, Elise, in 1915 in Germany to her husband, Theodore, while he was away at war. The letters on it are incomprehensible to me and my immediate family and I've always wanted it translated.

I tagged several friends in my post, including two relatives from Germany (who I have never had the opportunity to meet). Along with the post, I included a link to a VoiceThread I had created with a picture of the postcard (front and back) and my questions in voice and text (to help with translation). You can view that VoiceThread above. (By the way, additional photos have since been added to the VoiceThread in response to the dialogue -- a couple of which I had never seen before. The VoiceThread is becoming a family archive and I hope to continue adding voice descriptions and stories to it. Imagine the relevance this will have to my own grandchildren.)

The postcard is a family relic and I had been told by my mother that it contains a message from my grandmother, who was home caring for her five daughters (one of them my grandmother, Ella), while her husband was away on the battlefields of World War One. I wanted to know more than that though -- especially what the red text on the right side of the postcard said. The meaning of the postcard had been conveyed to me through my mother through oral stories but what did the postcard really say?

Within 12 hours of the status update, a dynamic exchange had ensued between my cousin, Thomas, in Germany, and a close family friend, Lore, who lives in the US but is from Germany. A high school friend, who I haven't talked to in more than 20 years but now lives in Germany, assisted with identifying the type of script used on the postcard too. The script, apparently, is not German but Suetterlin. This is one of the reasons why it's been so hard to translate over the years. Lore, apparently, had received instruction in reading and writing in Suetterlin when she was young.

The writing on the left side of the postcard, by Elise, shares her happiness upon hearing recent news that Theodore was healthy (we assume she had received a note from him not long before this was written). The postcard is date stamped 8-16-1915. But there is a handwritten phrase in red dated 8-25-1915. This phrase says, "killed in action." I had understood that the postcard had been returned to my grandmother with this handwritten mark upon it. However, my Facebook community keenly identified that the red letters are in ballpoint pen, indicating that it was written much more recently than the Suetterlin text which was made with a fountain pen.

The death of my great grandfather has been verified by another of my relatives in Germany who has located a photograph of Theodore's grave -- on which the date 8-23-1915 in inscribed (matching the red text on the postcard). Since I posted this on Facebook, I have also received never seen before pictures of Elise's parents (my great, great grandparents) including one of them standing in front of their own porcelain shop (these have been added to the VoiceThread). My cousin has also shared stories with me about Elise which I've never heard before -- she said that her husband had volunteered for the war but soon thereafter was "shot in the head." She was a strong woman, up until her death at age 99.

The postcard is a precious family relic to me. It is a metaphor of love, loss, and the incredible courage and human commitment of both Theodore, who voluntarily left for the war, and Elise, who raised five young daughters alone in early 20th century Germany.

With the combined help of Facebook and VoiceThread, a new layer of family history has been revealed and more keep coming. I'm very grateful to be alive right now. We have an unparalled opportunity to leverage social technologies to learn about and tell our own stories. We are all experts in something -- and when we have the opportunity to share those gifts with others, the power of social technologies is felt. That is part of our quest in this century, I believe -- to identify our passion and area of expertise and share it with the world. This empowers each of us to give something back to the world and leave our mark.

Finally, as an educator, I'm realizing the significance of this "moment" and how important it is to weave these opportunities into our students' learning experiences. Doing so would illuminate the deeper relevance of social media to our students to open up their own stories -- and encourage teachers to move away from our reliance on textbooks to facilitate learning. Mashable shared a related story today about how social media is informing world history events. How many history professors are working this concept into their curriculum, I wonder. I remember how difficult it was for me to connect with history when I was young -- I can't imagine how different my academic experience would have been if I were introduced to history through an opportunity to tell my own story and share it with the entire world.

As a result, I'm thinking about integrated a project into my online History of Photography class that requires students to "tell a story" involving a photograph and a defining family event. This project would include a research stage in which social media would be used to reveal new bits of information and the story would be shared in a student-generated VoiceThread. I really can't think of a more valuable learning experience. What do you think?

History is yours. What's your story?

Webinar: Supporting Student Success with VoiceThread

2011-12-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/592394922

Tips for Supporting Student Success with VoiceThread

Friday, December 9th

12:00pm PT/3:00pm ET

Michelle Pacansky-Brock, an award winning community college instructor, will share tips and strategies for using VoiceThread in your class. This includes strategies for managing student privacy, developing a technology profile of your students, fostering a community, and scaffolding your students’ use of VoiceThread so their focus stays on “learning” rather than “technology.” Participants will receive a collection of web-based resources to support your own professional development.

Discover New York: An Innovative First Year College Class

2011-12-01T07:30:00.000-08:00

I was joined today in my VoiceThread office hour by Heidi Upton who teaches at St. John's University in New York. She teaches a course called Discover New York which is a mandatory course for first year students at her institution. It's really pretty wonderful and I wanted to share it with you all!

The course "is an introduction to New York City through the lens of a particular subject discipline." Various faculty members teach the class and apply their own expertise to the curriculum, allowing students to explore various cultural aspects of New York including "immigration, race/ethnicity, religion, wealth and poverty, and the environment." Taking a non-traditional college approach, the city is engaged as text and students actively and critical interpret its landscape as a learning community.

I keep thinking about what an extraordinary model this is for colleges in or near any city. And what an enriching learning experience this would be. Are there other colleges you know about who integrate a course like this into their required curriculum? If so, let me know!

In Heidi's inaugural semester teaching the class, she took her students on trips through the city streets to experience the visual arts of New York. As they walked, Heidi and her students used photography to document things that intrigued or inspired them. Then they shared their visual recordings in a VoiceThread. Here is the VoiceThread Heidi created and shared with her students. Here, in her voice comments, she models the practice of and interpreting her visual experiences and is then joined by her students in a collaborative online learning environment.

Following this modeling exercise, each of Heidi's students created his/her own VoiceThread in which they shared their photographs and interpreting their discoveries in their own comments. A great project to support a great class! Thanks for sharing, Heidi!

Archive of Making Sense of Assessment with VoiceThread

2011-11-28T16:02:00.000-08:00

The archive of my recent webinar, Making Sense of Assessment with VoiceThread is now available.*

You are also invited to join me this Wednesday, November 30th at 12pm PT/3pm ET for an interactive online office hour. Bring your ideas and questions for an hour of engaging conversation about using VoiceThread for assessment! Participation is free but registration is required.

*Transparency note: I am currently consulting for VoiceThread as a Higher Ed Learning Consultant. This is paid position.

Wake Up! It's Time for an Online Learning Reality Check

2011-11-15T13:45:00.000-08:00

This month I attended the 17th Annual Sloan-C International Conference for Online Learning in Orlando. I have shared my reflections this month in a new GETInsight blog post. I hope you'll join me for a discussion there!

Wake Up! It's Time for an Online Learning Reality Check

Smarthistory Joins Khan Academy in Reinventing Education

2011-11-07T12:10:00.000-08:00

The Khan Academy has received extensive and impressive press this past year. And recently, they've joined forces with Smarthistory -- signalling an exciting turn in open content and, more importantly, signalling a major shift in how we teach our students.

The "brainchild" of Salman Khan, the Khan Academy is fundamentally a rich repository of effectively designed video lectures anchored in visually compelling annotative descriptions. It's really good stuff -- and it's not just for math students/teacher. With extensive funding from Google and Gates, the Khan Academy has branched out into new disciplines including biology and history.

The compelling element of The Khan Academy is that its popularity is encouraging a rethinking of how educators spend class time with students. If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know that I'm a supporter and practitioner of the flipped classroom model. But I'm also an art historian -- and that's really what this post is about.

About four years ago, I made a fortuitous connection with Beth Harris who, at the time, was teaching art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY. Beth shared a blog post about a little known tool named VoiceThread -- which knocked me out of my seat. It was Beth's willingness to experiment and share that inspired me to try VoiceThread and led to a spiraling of innovation and sharing in my own teaching practices. I reached out to Beth to say thank you and she responded by setting up a VoiceThread and inviting me to collaborate with her -- and then with her college Steven Zucker. Asynchronously, we conversed in a VoiceThread about Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434. It was amazing and opened my eyes to so many things -- but most compelling was the potential of technology to break open the medieval traditions of the art history lecture, a rethinking of the role of an "instructor."

Beth and Steven continued to follow this thread of intellectual curiosity and went on to create Smarthistory, a website based upon building a content resource for art history comprised of recording of unscripted conversations about works of art. It's different ... and it's great. Smarthistory describes itself as a "multimedia web-book about art and art history." On the one hand, it is explicitly challenging the traditional 40-pound, $100 art history "learning" resource. But it's so much more than that. Listening to a Smarthistory dialogue does not explicitly tell you what you will learn. Rather, it requires you to think critically about what you're hearing and synthesize and evaluate the content to form knowledge. Smarthistory fosters the skills we all need to effectively navigate the mangled web of content we are entrenched in every day.

Here's a sample:

"Modeling conversations" is what educators need to be doing more of today. And it's precisely that that I think is so fabulous about open content and the flipped classroom model. When we "unlearn" how to lecture, we are forced to learn how to model conversations with and between our students. This is a quote by David Weinberger shared on the Smarthistory blog:

“Educators therefore face a different set of challenges. Very different. Their authority is in question since we’ve learned that we can learn more from talking with others than by listening to any single expert. But, more important, if knowledge emerges from conversations, then just about all our educational focus ought to be on learning how to be good conversationalists: how to listen, how to kindle a conversation, how to evaluate claims, how to speak in a voice worth hearing… and, most of all, how to share a world in which knowledge is plural, for that’s what conversation and knowledge is about.”

Congratulations to Beth Harris and her "smart" team. Thank you for being bold, taking risks, and leading the way to new learning paradigms. Can't wait to see what the future holds!

How Recruiters Use Social Networks (Infographic)

2011-10-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

I saw this infographic on Mashable this week and thought it was incredibly relevant to my previous post, College Students: Why Social Media Matters To You. This infographic does a solid job of pointing out the potential for social media use to result in negative and positive effects on future employment.

How are new college grads learning how to craft their social media presence in the most effective way? Is this a skill that could or should be an outcome of a college degree? Is your college's career services department integrating these skills into their workshops and other services? And what about our online students? I'd love to hear your thoughts and any related activities on your campus.

Dear College Students: Why Social Media Matters To You

2011-10-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

Many new college grads are realizing is that their college degree is lacking an important proficiency: a social media presence. A friend of mine recently graduate with his BS degree in Finance. He had a great lead on a job at a high tech company and things felt promising. But the feedback he received was, "Spend some time developing your social network profile and then our recruiters will consider you." That's not something he learned in college. But, arguably, it should have been.

Why? Because in a participatory culture, what others say about you is more important than what you say about yourself. Step up, folks. It's time to join in.

If you're on the social media sidelines, here are three simple steps to join in:

1. Define your niche. Everything starts with your niche. If you imagined yourself on a stage, what are you speaking/singing/dancing about? Why would people want to be in your audience? Who are those people? These are the people you want to connect with. These are the people who want to learn from you.

2. Start your LinkedIn profile, build your connections -- and, perhaps most importantly, get recommendations from your connections.

3. Create a Twitter account, start following interesting people who have something smart to say or share.

4. Give back. Social media is a two-way street.
Create a blog and share what you know. This includes ideas, reflections, tips, strategies (in all formats -- writing, videos, PDFs, you name it!).
Tweet relevant, thought provoking ideas and resources (in the form of links).
5. Worried about privacy? Then don't share private information.

Go. Do it today. Your future may depend on it.

Archive: How and Why to Flip Your Classroom with VoiceThread

2011-10-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

The archive of last week's webinar is now available at the following link. Captions will be added shortly.

Click here to view, "How and Why to Flip Your Classroom with VoiceThread."

Mark your calendar and stay tuned for details about next month's webinar, "Making Sense of Assessments with VoiceThread," November 17th at 12pm PST/ 3pm EST.

From Grades to Badges?

2011-10-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

There are some exciting things happening at the intersection of digital media, lifelong learning, and assessment. Check out my latest GETInsight blog post on GETideas.org to read about the current HASTAC-Mozilla "Badges for Lifelong Learning" competition and ponder the future of information and formal assessment.

Click here to read the blog post -- and feel free to add a reflection in the companion VoiceThread!

Pearson+Google vs Blackboard = An Interesting LMS Frontier

2011-10-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

After a two year reprieve, I begun teaching with Blackboard again in August. In '09 I was using Blackboard 8.0 and now I'm teaching with Blackboard 9.1. Yes, some things have changed but, in essence, all the frustration and rigidity that restricts my ability to employ pedagogical creativity within Blackboard remains. And, to me, the more I teach with Blackboard, the better hacker I become. That's not right and the rigidity and bugginess of Blackboard is, undoubtedly, frustrating faculty and making creative teachers give up on experimentation which is not a good thing in the context of 21st century teaching and learning. Can anyone out there relate to that feeling?

So, this morning when I read the news about Pearson (which has been funding Ning Minis for educators in North America for more than a year now, including two I use for professional development and community college teaching) and Google joining forces to launch a new, free, social learning management system called OpenClass, I was intrigued. Still in beta, the description sounds intriguing. What I'm foreseeing is an opportunity for OpenClass to engage faculty who are experimental, early adopters, attempting to force Blackboard to "accept" and "tolerate" Google Apps, VoiceThread, Twitter widgets, and other web 2.0 and social media infusions into its system -- with not a whole lot of success. But institutions will shake their head and remain skeptical about supporting OpenClass, especially the institutions that have adopted Blackboard across systems.

This could be a turning point. One that will truly separate those committed to a "learning" paradigm and those invested, still, in an outdated "teaching" paradigm (Barr and Tagg, 1995 - PDF). While I have yet to even see OpenClass, I am sensing that the future of college learning just got a lot more interesting.

Which path are you on?

How and Why to Flip Your Classroom With VoiceThread

2011-10-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

I will be hosting a free VoiceThread webinar on Thursday, October 20th. I will share a case study from my own community college art history classroom that demonstrates how I flipped my classroom with VoiceThread. Find out how I did it and why but, more importantly, how students responded and what its effect was on engagement, learning, and success!

Register today! Seats are limited!

The foundation of the 'flipped classroom' model is a series of mobile lectures paired with formative assessments that students complete prior to coming to class. VoiceThread is a single, easy to use tool that masterfully delivers mobile content with voice, visuals, and video and invites students to participate in engagement assessment activities.

This model empowers an instructor to use class time on topics that matter to students. With passive listening taking place outside of class, students become active participants and engage in discussion, debate and critique to foster higher order thinking skills. The mobile lectures provide the flexibility to pause, rewind, and learn in a way that meets individuals needs. You'll be surprised to learn how students responded and the effects of the experiment on student satisfaction, success, and attrition rates.

Please share!

VoiceThread Mobile Is Here.

2011-10-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

Like 35% of Americans, I have a smartphone. And like 2/3 of them, I sleep with it. (Pew, July 2011)

Over the past two years as my iPhone and, more recently, iPad have crept into my life and begun to play an integral role in the way I learn, communicate, and socialize (not that those three should be exclusive of each other), I have stumbled many times with VoiceThread. VoiceThread's web interface is flash-based and, as many of you know, it doesn't work on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.

But today that changes!

I am elated to announce the release of VoiceThread Mobile. The new VoiceThread mobile app is available for free in the Apple App Store. Check it out! Aside from its beautiful design (of which I keep thinking Steve Jobs would approve) the app is exciting because will increase student access to dynamic, participatory learning experiences, making them available to anyone with an Apple iOS device from anywhere at anytime. It also facilitates easy voice (or text) commenting from a mobile device -- oh, and let's not forget the dazzling doodle capability too!

Here's the workflow. Download and install the app from the App Store. If you are an existing VoiceThread user, just sign in and all of your VoiceThreads -- any that you have created, shared with you, or to which you have subscribed -- are all instantly at your fingertips! You can open one, listen/read, and comment in voice or text. I have already left voice comments in one of my class VoiceThreads from my iPhone. It's a really cool experience -- especially for edugeeks like me. I haven't shared the app news with my students but one of them has already sent me an email letting me know about the new app! I guess good news travels quickly.

You can also create new VoiceThreads using any of the images in your mobile library -- or take a moment to create one on the spot and transform it into a rich, warm, conversation starter.

And, as for your students who have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, they can now participate in the VoiceThreads you create and share with them.

How? Well, if you share the VoiceThread with them using VoiceThread's "Groups" feature, then the VoiceThread is automatically there for them after they sign in to the app.

But -- this is genius (and I actually had to revise this post after it was published because I didn't realize this smooth process had been developed!) -- if you simply share a link to a VoiceThread in your course management system, the link will direct students on a laptop or desktop to the web application of VoiceThread and students on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to the app! Here is a screenshot of what a student using an iPhone would see, for example, after clicking on the link you put in your course management system:

My recommendation is to include the embedded version of the VoiceThread (I enlarge the size to 640x480 by manually manipulating the embed code) and a link to the VoiceThread. After the link, make a note that says, "click on this link to open a larger or full-size version of the VoiceThread in a new page or in the free VoiceThread mobile app (for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches)."

For me, the most exciting part of the app is how I can fold it right into the way I'm already using VoiceThread. In this way, it augments a students' options by increasing their access to our learning activities. I love that.

Check it out and let me know what you think...and how you will use it!

(Note: I am a consultant for VoiceThread and an educator who has used VoiceThread for four years and is passionate about its possibilities!)

The Backchannel Boom

2011-09-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Mobile technologies are continuing to open new doors for transforming a presentation from a passive to an active experience for an audience member or student. Currently, some college professors are exploring the possibilities of integrating a Twitter backchannel into a live presentation, as a method of engaging the thoughts and reflections of audience members. Others use alternative methods like Wall Wisher, Poll Everywhere, and Wiffiti.

They each have their own unique characteristics and possibilities -- some require more set up on the part of the presenter and all require audience members (or students) to have some type of mobile access. Despite the array of options that exist today, most college lectures remain static, passive experiences for students. Integrating a backchannel is far more complex than just learning a new tool. It introduces a dramatic power shift, flattening out the traditional hierarchy between presenter and audience member and weaving in the flow of otherwise silent ideas, reflections, and questions into the presenter's experiences. Like all effective online participation experiences, both presenter and participants require a new set of etiquette rules which can make or break the experience.

Shakespeak
I was recently contacted by Nastasiya Koval from Amsterdam who shared a new (well, new to me) product with me called Shakespeak. It looks promising and there is evidence from use at Dutch Universities demonstrating increased exam results. What I like about it is that it extends options for participating in the backchannel via text, web, or Twitter. These options are nice, as they include students who have a feature phone (phone with text messaging) or smartphone (phone with internet) -- tools that all college students have today.

You can try Shakespeak out for free with up to 20 participants and then a premium account is necessary. Which to me, raises the question, how are institutions stepping up to support professor use of technologies like this one? Free tools are great but standardizing our students' experiences is an effective step towards eliminating their necessity to learn and use an array new tools.

Are you Using a Backchannel? Please Share Your Experiences.
If your college or university has a paid subscription to a tool that supports mobile backchannel participation, let me know! If you are experimenting with backchannels on your own, I'd love to hear how it's going and what tool(s) you use. Please leave a comment -- this topic will be included in a my forthcoming book and your voices are valuable!

Our Space: Skills for Ethical Participation in New Media

2011-09-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Here is a new curriculum resource shared by the GoodPlay Project (Harvard Graduate School of Education) and Project New Media Literacies (established at MIT and now housed at University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism).

The materials are "designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments." It's a fabulous, much needed resource.

But what I'm left wondering is whether or not there is a similar resource made available to adults? What do you think? Certainly, fostering digital citizenship in our youth is critical but what mechanisms, formal or informal, do we have in place to foster these skills in adults?

Should these also be framed as 21st century professor proficiencies? And what percentage of professors today have mastered them at this point? What do you think?

http://www.goodworkproject.org/practice/our-space/

VoiceThread SmartTeacher Badge Program

2011-09-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

After four years of transforming my online and face-to-face teaching through the use of VoiceThread (and other fabulous tools), I am now officially working for VoiceThread as a (paid) consultant. I share that to be transparent but also because I'm really excited!

Since I resigned from my most recent full-time academic position nearly two years ago, I've been in search of my next step. I can't say I've found it yet but it feels really great to be working for a company that has brought so much value into my own teaching and fostered such dynamic, inclusive learning environments for so many of my students who commonly feel marginalized in traditional "lecture-based" classes (or online classes that are the virtual equivalent of a lecture class).

Over the coming months, I'll be fleshing out my role with VoiceThread but I have been tasked with developing training and support for higher ed clients about the effective integration of VoiceThread in support of pedagogy. How cool is that?

Last week, I felt like the planets were aligned when the new HASTAC Digital Media & Learning Competition was announced. This is fourth competition released in this series and it's focus is on "Badges for Lifelong Learning." In an instant, I had a vision of how VoiceThread could develop a training program designed around digital badges that also fosters the ongoing development and sharing of open educational resources.

With the support of Steve Muth and Ben Papell, the VoiceThread co-founders, I began to write. And today I entered our submission into the DML Competition. It's titled the "VoiceThread SmartTeacher Badge Program" and you can read the full submission overview here (and leave a comment or "like" it while you are there!).

Essentially, it's an open training program built around the concept of "SmartTeaching" which integrates the use of VoiceThread into a learning environment using the principles of Universal Design for Learning and brain research. The program trains educators to teach with VoiceThread while simultaneously developing a growing repository of VoiceThread samples, shared with a CC license in support of open educational resources.

And three cheers for Pat James, Dean of Technology and Distance Learning at Mt. San Jacinto College, who immediately supported the concept and got institutional support to participate in a pilot. All this is contingent, however, upon the grant's approval. So wish us luck!

Then leave me a comment and let me know what you think. If you like the concept, please share it with your networks!

Teach with Twitter? Read This!

2011-09-13T08:55:00.000-07:00

Twitter holds many opportunities for increasing student interaction and engagement. But many instructors don't realize until it's too late that Twitter doesn't automatically archive your students' tweets. That is, once your students get active and you're tracking their tweets with a hashtag in Twitter, those tweets will disappear shortly (note that I use the term "disappear" loosely -- digital footprints are permanent, live by that rule). That's because Twitter is intended to be a method for tracking the current pulse of the web's consciousness. And with millions of tweets flowing into this consciousness every minute, archiving the past isn't a priority.

There are many methods, however, for archiving tweets, including applications that have been developed especially for that purpose (see this ReadWriteWeb post for many ideas). But I had an "ah ha" moment this morning while reading a new post over at ProfHacker. Mark Sample shared a simple way to "hack" an RSS feed for a particular Twitter hashtag. I had always wondered if it was just me that couldn't figure out how to locate an RSS feed for a twitter hashtag. Whew. Apparently, I'm not alone.

Follow the simple process below to locate the RSS feed URL (http://...) for a hashtag. Once you have it, plug the feed URL into an aggregator (like Google Reader, or Feed Reader) and BAM! you've got yourself your own archive in your own aggregator.

Here is the simple recipe shared by Sample which was construed by academic librarian Valerie Forrestal (thanks, Valerie!). Copy the url you see below and simply replace the bolded "hashtag" with the hashtag you want to follow in your aggregator.

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23hashtag

As Sample explains, "to follow the #MLA12 stream, this is the URL you need: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23mla12. The '%23' takes care of the actual hash (pound sign), so you don’t need to include an “#” in the URL."

If you don't already use an aggregator and use Google apps (like Gmail, Google docs, Sites, etc.), give Google Reader a try. It's very simple and you'll find a handy link to it at the top of your Gmail page which makes it convenient to access on the fly.

Once you have Google Reader open, you simply click on the "Add a subscription" button in the upper left corner (see image), paste your customized Twitter RSS feed, and then click subscribe and you're done. All the tweets sent with your class hashtag will be fed into Google Reader and you can keep track of them there. The additional benefit to this process is that Google Reader will allow you to link back to the original tweet, even if you can no longer find it in Twitter.

Thanks for sharing Valerie and Mark!

I hope many of you can benefit from that simple trick.

Student Instructions for VoiceThread: Public Domain - use as you wish!

2011-09-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

I am currently serving as an online teaching mentor in @One's online teaching certification program. Today I spent an hour with a mentee who is refining his online class. One of the things we talked about was the importance of "clear instructions" when teaching online. Clear instructions make or break a class. And taking the extra time to be clear upfront saves you a lot of time in the end, and keeps your students focused on important things -- like learning!

He is integrating VoiceThread into his class but didn't have instructions prepared for his students explaining how to use it. So I copied my instructions into a PDF and sent them off to him. Then I started thinking about how many other instructors (and student) could benefit from those instructions. I once had a professor tell me, "If I could just have all the 'how to' instructions provided for me, I'd be so much more comfortable with using new tools."

So, I pasted the instructions into a document, added a Creative Commons 0 license which "dedicates" (I love that word) it into the public domain. That means you are free to use them -- one piece, half, the entire thing -- without asking my permission or feeling like you're "taking my stuff." Ahhh, doesn't that feel good? :)

I have the instructions shared on the Educator Guides tab of my blog and you can grab them from the link below too. I encourage them to be shared in conjunction with the "How to Participate" guide (which I require attribution for if you use it).

Download the VoiceThread Student Instructions.

Download the How to Participate in a VoiceThread guide.

What content of your own could you dedicate to the public domain that other educators could benefit from? If you find this resource helpful, I hope you'll consider giving back and promoting a culture of sharing.

The Flipped Classroom: an Infographic

2011-09-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

I am an enthusiastic supporter and practitioner of the "Flipped Classroom." I see it as a very tangible reality for improving the learning outcomes of college students, the mainstream understands how and why it works. This infographic, which I picked up via David Wicks' blog, visually communicates several of the key concepts of the Flipped Classroom.

Please take a look and be sure to share with your own networks!

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Hey Prof, Wanna Hang Out in Google+

2011-08-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

The potential that Google+ holds for college teaching and learning is a hot topic. If you haven't yet participated in Google+ but want to learn a little more about its super-charged collaboration features -- and highly customizable privacy layers -- errr, "circles" -- I invite you to read my latest GETInsight blog post.

Click here to read: Hey Prof, Wanna Hang Out in Google+?

YouTube Playlists: Tips for Teaching Effectively with Video

2011-08-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

Evidence has shown that many college professors use YouTube for teaching. I'm really not sure what that means, as there are a plethora of ways to "use YouTube" as a professor. I think most professors today are linking YouTube videos into their classes but what else can we be doing? Or how else can we use YouTube as a learning resource for our students?

I regularly encourage college professors to have a free YouTube account included in their essential teaching toolkit. First, having an account will at the very least open the door for you to start to think about creating and sharing your own videos (with a Creative Commons license, please, so we all can benefit from your greatness). But even if you don't upload your own videos, an account allows you to begin curating your own video content into playlists which can kick up the volume of effective use of YouTube videos as content in your classes -- and then you can get more creative about how to use them to foster student-centered learning environments too.

What are YouTube playlists?
For example, in my YouTube account, I have set up a few different playlists and as I upload my own videos and search for existing videos, I can add related content to each playlist. You can think of a playlist as a "collection" or a "folder" or a "group" if that helps. Here are my existing playlists:
1) Teaching with Emerging Technologies: Tips, tricks, and samples of effective practices for teaching with emerging technologies.
2) History of Photography: Videos that, well, are about the history of photography.
3) Daguerreotype and Calotype: Videos that demonstrate the two early photographic processes. Now the videos in this playlist are also in my "History of Photography" playlist.

How can playlists be used effectively to support learning?
Let's say you are teaching a focused unit that covers a specific topic and you have three videos (keep them brief and focused) you want to share with your students.
Your options are:

Link out from your course management system to each of the three videos. Booo! Why oh why would you want to send your students out to YouTube even once, let alone three times! There's always something more tantalizing than your course content on YouTube. Be real.
Embed each of the three videos in your course management sytem. Restrained applause. A better option, as your students' focus and flow stays within your course. But embedding three videos takes up a lot of real estate in a course.
Embed your playlist! Standing ovation! Now we're talking. With playlists, you can embed a small player in your course management system that plays each video in your playlist in a sequence, one right after the other.
And how about taking this one step further? Jaw drops to ground. If you use a collaborative environment (like Ning -- my favorite) to facilitate your students' learning, you can have your students collaboratively curate their own relevant playlists or groups of videos. You give them the topic and criteria, they find they video and contribute it to the group. Then this collaboratively constructed content can be engaged by the rest of the class in a range of activities -- like blog posts!

Tip! Be sure to clearly indicate how long the entire playlist is so your students can plan accordingly. And keep it as brief as possible.

Want to see this tip in action? Watch this 3-minute video:

VoiceThread Example: Instructional Video + Formative Assessment

2011-08-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

I am sharing an example of a VoiceThread I created for my online History of Photography students. The VoiceThread is part instructional content (via a 7-minute video included within the VoiceThread) and part formative assessment. The formative assessment is demonstrated through the slides following the video that incorporate objective and subjective/discussion oriented questions, assessing lower and higher order levels of learning. The introductory slides are provided to anchor the activity with clear groundrules and expectations.

I should also note that VoiceThread is not the only assessment method I use in the class. Traditional assessments and regular blog posts are also integrated.

I'm sharing this because I know how helpful it can be to teachers to have an opportunity to see examples of how tools are being used. I hope this will encourage you to share examples from your own classes that demonstrate how you're integrating web 2.0 and social media tools into your students' learning. I'm also sharing this example because as I interact with faculty, I am finding that many are aware of VoiceThread to some degree but few understand that a single VoiceThread has the potential to be a learning mashup, incorporating presentation slides, video, images and assessment rather than a container for a Powerpoint presentation.

I'm also experimenting with VoiceThread Groups for the first time this term. I'll share more about that later.

Feel free to add a comment in the VoiceThread if you'd like to experiment! Just click "Sign in or Register"and if you don't yet have a free VoiceThread account, create one with your name and email.

And in case you're wondering, here are the steps I took to create this example. It took me about 8-hours to produce (which, YES, to me is the greatest obstacle for creating high quality online content):

Create Video

Create Keynote or Powerpoint presentation for the "video" portion.
Write transcript for the "video" portion.
Use a screencast tool (I used Screenflow) to record the Keynote and produce the raw video file. I read the transcript as I record.
Export the raw screencast into a .mov file.

Create Presentation

Use Keynote or Powerpoint to create the Introductory and Assessment slides.
Export the presentation to a PDF file(PDFs hold up much better than PPTs in VoiceThread and VT does not support Keynote files).

Create Online Transcript of Video

This can be done in a multitude of ways. I simply pasted my transcript into a Google doc.

Create a VoiceThread

Log into my VoiceThread Account
Click on the Create Tab
Click "Upload"
Upload the .mov file
Upload the PDF file
Drag and drop slides until they area arranged in correct order.
Click on the single slide that contains the .mov file. It will appear in the 'placeholder' to the right. Add title: "Click here to read the transcript." In the URL area, paste the link to the Google doc.

Click "Comment"

Leave voice comments on each slide, replicating the text so the content is equivalent in both text and audio formats (for hearing impaired students).

Click "Share"

Adjust the Playback and Publishing Options.
Copy the link, html embed code or share with appropriate group.

VoiceThread Tip: Use Identities to Improve Communication With Students

2011-08-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

When I take a step back and think about "how" I am using VoiceThread in my online teaching, I equate each VoiceThread to the time I spend with students in a classroom. In my VoiceThreads, students demonstrate their skills and understanding of concepts and I provide my feedback to some (not all) of them. Like a classroom, when I make a comment in response to a contribution, the other students have the opportunity to listen and learn or tune out. Like a classroom, some students demonstrate their proficiency of a concept while others are just beginning to wrap their arms around it.

While I've been using VoiceThread for four years, I continue to try new things and find creative solutions to some of things I'd like to improve. One of those things is the ability for students to clearly recognize that I've left a comment for them. For those of you who use VoiceThread, you know that a user's avatar appears only once on a slide, regardless of how many comments s/he has left.

Here's a solution I'm trying out this week for the first time. It dawned upon me that I leave three types of comments in my VoiceThreads:

1. Introductory comments: the ones that do not change term over term and provide students with a voice narration of the activity objectives, helpful tips, and objectives.

2. Sample comments: When an activity is more conceptual in nature, I will leave a "sample comment" on at least one slide giving the students a hook to get started and provided clarity about how I want the comments to be structured. This can really make or break an activity and usually helps to "break the ice" too.

3. Feedback comments: My VoiceThread activities are "open" for a period of seven days (Tues-Mon). I enter the VoiceThread early in the week to ensure there are no problems that I need to fix and then mid-week (Friday) I will enter the VoiceThread and leave feedback comments for the students who have participated. These comments are important, as they redirect students who are still forming an understanding of a concept/idea ("Great job. You're on you're way and here's how you can improve...) and they identify the contributions that demonstrate proficiency ("That was an excellent contribution because you...").

A single VoiceThread account has the capability to have multiple "Identities" built in. For example, when I log into VoiceThread, I step into the "Michelle Pacansky-Brock" identity which has an avatar of my photograph. Before I leave a comment, I can toggle over to any other identity built into my account. Up until now, I've always used a single identity for all the comments I leave for my students. This week it occurred to me that I can use the VoiceThread "Identities" feature to "label" my introductory, sample, and feedback comments.

Screenshot showing Sample and Feedback Identities and student comments.

In other words, I no have three separate identities within my account:

Michelle Pacansky-Brock (avatar is my photo) which I use for my "Introductory" comments
Sample (avatar is a yellow square with the word "sample!!" on it)
Feedback (avatar is a blue square with <----- arrows)

Before I leave my comment, I quickly toggle over to the appropriate identity and then go to work. Here is a screenshot of one slide showing both the "Sample" and "Feedback" avatar:

EasyBib: Mobile Research, Annotation, and Information Literacy

2011-08-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure today to spend 30 minutes with Jessica Bacques who took me on a virtual tour of EasyBib. As a community college instructor, I have seen the challenges that my own students have faced with mastering both the research and annotation process, as well as effectively assessing the credibility of digital sources. EasyBib offers an easy to use, web-based tool (with mobile app option -- currently only iPhone but Android and iPad will follow soon).

Dynamic, Digital Note Taking
Really, EasyBib blends the best of both worlds -- it provides a paperless approach for students to begin the research process by creating digital "sticky notes" within their account that can be organized into groups by dragging and dropping them onto each other. The groups can be labeled with titles and also identified through color coding. Personally, watching the note taking demo brought me right back to my own middle school years when I had a teacher who demonstrated how to take research notes on paper notecards. That strategy, honestly, is an excellent one but who wants to manage paper notecards today in our digital mobile society?

After the "sticky notes" are made, grouped, and coded, a user can then automatically drag them (in groups) over a separate working space and EasyBib turns the content from the sticky notes into a clean outline format.

One-Click Bibliography Entries
As for creating a bibliography (that can also be annotated), that's streamlined too. To build a bibliography, users with an iPhone app can simply scan a book's barcode and in the web client a user can enter an ISBN number if using a book and EasyBib provides a list from which you just click the citation you want to use. Throughout the creation process, users who have a Pro account can easily toggle their bibliography to appear in either MLA, APA or Chicago/Turbian format -- free accounts only provide content in MLA format. If only I had this in grad school!

I know there are folks out there who are going to criticize EasyBib and argue that it takes the "rigor" out of research. For me, I see it as an opportunity bridge a student's passion and interest in a topic directly into the research process, rather than watching them stumble and get frustrated with the languages of MLA, Chicago, APA, etc. and fumble with trying to bridge their digital world with academia's expectations. There's no greater obstacle in research than getting hung up on the process. Doing research should be seamless so one can focus on developing their thoughts, ideas, and arguments.

Fostering Information Literacy
And, one final feature that I think ALL of us could learn from! Today we continue to stumble through a transition from academic traditions rooted in paper, peer-reviewed content to digital content that may be credible, somewhat credible, or a bunch of slop. Web 2.0 has really blurred one's ability to discern credible information from crap. To paraphrase what Howard Rheingold has said, "The number one thing our student need to learn today is how to develop their own crap detector."

In EasyBib, if you select "website" as your source type, you are provided with a box to paste the url to your website. If that website is one of the top 5,000 sites accessed by EasyBib users (this is a beta feature and this number will expand as we move forward), it will apply a rubric to assess the validity of the site. You can click on the "Learn More" link to view the rubric and begin to learn how and why the site is valid, may be valid, or is not valid. To me, this makes a fabulous learning activity in and of itself for librarians, professors, teachers and students.

You can learn more about EasyBib here or watch the video overview below. If you are using EasyBib, please leave a comment here to share your experiences! Thanks.

Teaching in the Age of Participation

2011-07-14T11:25:00.000-07:00

The fantastic crew from the 2011 Online Teaching Conference has shared my keynote on YouTube. If you wanted to be there but couldn't, feel free to view it below or on YouTube.

Learning from Pain

2011-07-05T22:32:00.000-07:00

It feels like human nature to avoid painful situations. But when they are upon us, we learn a great deal about who we are.

Whether it's not getting the job that you believed, with all your heart, was your place in the world; spraining an ankle when you need to be mobile the most; or relocating your entire family when you really love where you are -- all are difficult, frustrating, even heart-wrenching experiences. But each forces us into a mental state in which we are challenged to create a new path for ourselves. As a result, we must reprioritize, make choices about what's valuable to our existence and what is not, and rekindle our zest for life.

Pain sucks. But there is tremendous learning within it if we can pause to reflect.

Pearson Extends Funding of Ning Minis

2011-06-21T13:57:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, Pearson stepped up and generously offered to foot the bill for Ning Mini networks created for educational use in North America (includes K12 and higher ed). I'm one of those who jumped on this opportunity, as I had been using Ning for years as a participatory environment for my online students to interact in and learn from one another. The partnership started with some rocky communications, in my opinion, but those hiccups were resolved within a couple of months and has resulted in a great opportunity for educators to experiment with a dynamic social network tool that provides you with the ability to create a private network for students to blog, create a collaborative image and video collection (Tip! You decide what the overarching topic is and let your students search and share), generate their own discussion forums, and more.

I've used Ning as an enhancement to my course management system, creating specific required activities to be completed in Ning and letting students explore, connect, discuss, share on other topics and content as desired. It's really been fabulous and I plan to use it again this fall for a new online class I'm currently developing. View this video to learn more.

So...I was excited to receive a message from Ning today announcing that the Pearson partnership has been extended one more year. Yeah! But what will happen after that? No clue. I encourage us to take this as an opportunity to experiment and explore the value of social networking in formalized learning environments. Our goal should be to identify the value of such a tool for student learning and begin to advocate for support from our institutions or come up with alternative ideas. Have one? Please share!

Here's how to request a Pearson-funded Ning Mini:

Go to Ning.com
Click "Get started now" to create your very own network. This will initiate the 30-day free trial period.
Once your network is created, apply for Pearson funding here.
You'll hear from Pearson shortly!

Online Teaching Conference: Ready to Roll!

2011-06-20T16:09:00.000-07:00

This week I am attending one of my favorite annual conferences, the Online Teaching Conference at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, CA. The event is a collaboration between CETC and CUE, fostering a unique opportunity for K-20 educators to come together and participate face-to-face or virtually. We have about 300 people registered to attend the in-person conference and another 600 attending virtually!

I'm excited to take this as an opportunity to meet many of the faculty I've had in my Building Online Community with Social Media and Intro to Online Teaching and Learning classes (taught through @One), as well as the faculty who are currently enrolled in @One's Online Teaching Certification Program. Please come say hello!

This year is really special for me, as I've been invited to present the Friday morning general session keynote presentation. In an effort to connect and share my resources with the broader online teaching community, I'm sharing the sessions and events in which I'll be participating at the conference.
If you're registered for the in-person, please come by and say hello! Or participate in the backchannel on Twitter by following #otc11.

Thurs, 6/23:

11:00am - The @One Online Teaching Certification Program: Take Your Teaching to New Heights. If you are a participant in this program, please come by and share your experiences!

View Presentation

3:30pm - VoiceThread -- join Katie Schiavo, Director of Communications for VoiceThread, for a preview of VoiceThread's soon to be released mobile (iOS) app! I will be on hand to assist with the Q and A portion of the session.

Friday, 6/24:

9:00am - Teaching in the Age of Participation (General Session and Webcast): Join me as I share my personal journey as a teacher through the emergence of web 2.0 and social media. Explore the potential our new participatory culture holds for new levels of student engagement and life long learning.

11:00am - Practical Strategies for Promoting Online Student Engagement (Webcast) with
Andrea Henne, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, David Monda, Kevin Davidson, and Scott Campbell Are you looking for ways to create an online learning environment that has a more human touch? Do you know how to make the most of your online communication options? What are some of the do's and dont's for presenting course content and providing constructive criticism and feedback to your students? Our panel of seasoned online instructors will answer these questions and share their successful strategies for online student learning, engagement, and retention.

View My Presentation: The Human Touch - It Really Matters!

1:00pm - Shifting the Ratemyprofessors.com Paradigm with Michelle Pacansky-Brock. Imagine if your students had the option to get to know you -- rather than read reviews about you on RateMyProfessors.com -- before they register for your classes. This session will teach you how to create a free website with Google Sites that you can use to communicate course policies, share your syllabus, and even embed a video that introduces yourself and your teaching style to your students.

View the companion Google Site.

Lifelong Learning with Twitter

2011-06-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, I reluctantly began to use Twitter. I was curious to understand why so many found such a superficial, ridiculous tool so compelling. After all, why would I care to read a description of "what you are doing" in 140 characters or less and why would you care "what I'm doing?"

Today, I am continually amazed and exhilarated at the vast resources and support my Twitter community provides for me around the clock. I has become my own personalized professional development program and I despite the fact that there are more than one billion tweets sent per week, most educators are not engaged and have not realized the significance that Twitter holds for student engagement, digital literacy, research, and professional development.

Recently, I shared a success story on my blog about another reluctant part-time college professor, @Bio_prof, who says Twitter has helped her foster her own community of educators and she now feels more supported and less alone in her teaching endeavors. Given that most college classes are taught by part-time instructors, I'd argue that this is a relevant conversation to have.

This month, in my GETInsight blog post, I reflect on Lifelong Learning with Twitter. I invite you to read the blog post and contribute your story or thoughts about Twitter in the related VoiceThread (which is also embedded below).

Maybe summer is a good time to start curating your own Twitter network? Follow me @brocansky.

Preview of VoiceThread Mobile at the OTC!

2011-06-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

I admit I'm a bit of a VoiceThread junkie but I hope you too will be excited to hear that VoiceThread will be releasing a mobile version of its product in the coming months! And if you're eager to get a special sneak peek, join me and Katie Schiavo, Director of Communications for VoiceThread, at the Online Teaching Conference in Costa Mesa next week! There's still time to register!

The VoiceThread presentation will be on Thursday, June 23rd at 3:30.

VoiceThread is also a sponsor for the OTC and will be sharing a few giveaways to lucky "Open Learning Heroes."

Ning Mini: Blog Moderation Now an Option

2011-06-15T13:08:00.000-07:00

I just received an email from Garnor Morantes at Ning informing me that Ning has changed the blog moderation setting in the Ning Mini plan to be an option, rather than a requirement. You can read the Ning announcement here.

Since Ning shifted from free to premium services about a year ago, Pearson has stepped up and funded the cost of Ning Minis (the basic plan) for educators in North America. I have been one educator who has taken advantage of this generous offer from Pearson and, despite my endless searching, I can't find a better environment that fosters peer-to-peer learning through blogging and integrates media (images, video, and html) easily and seamlessly with privacy options.

The one gripe I've had about the Ning Mini is the fact that it has required a network creator to approve each and every blog post before it would appear within a network. This may be a preferred setting for some network creators, but when you're a teacher who has set up a private network and has already ensured that members are comprised of only her students, then the moderation requirement fragments the flow of the community building and also places an unnecessary work burden on the instructor. To build community effectively, students really need to be empowered to make contributions independently and the added 'approval' process undercuts my interest in establishing a flat learning environment in which all contributions are equally valued and encouraged. The blog moderation has felt like a rude intrusion of the traditional hierarchy between professor and student that I try to resculpt into a more nuanced relationship based upon trust and support.

I am happy to see this change be made. And I appreciate the efforts of Ning to reach out and communicate this update with me personally.

Participation Yields Innovation: A Success Story

2011-06-09T09:50:00.000-07:00

Last fall, I began to weave Twitter into the activities in my Building Online Community with Social Media class. This is a class I've taught for @One for years and my students are primarily college faculty. I honestly had no idea if any student in that class would realize the significance of Twitter. I had hopes that they would but, like any experimentation, I realized it would be hit or miss. I have one terrific success story I'd like to share.

In that Fall 2010 class, one student approached me directly and shared her reluctance about using Twitter. She was concerned about privacy in the open Twitter landscape. First, I applauded her concern. I advise my students, "If you wouldn't shout it from the rooftops, don't tweet it." I encouraged her to give Twitter a try and also encouraged her not to share anything she didn't feel comfortable sharing. She took that advice and began to tweet and follow others with like interests -- and some pretty incredible results surfaced.

Her name is Ana and she teaches part-time for several colleges. Since she became part of the Twitter community, she shared that she has developed a rich sense of community and a sense of belonging that she didn't have before. She told me she feels "less alone" in her teaching and, honestly, I've been pretty amazed with the types of innovations she's implementing into her biology classes. Along with becoming a Twitter user, @Bio_prof, she also started her own blog which you can check out for yourself and learn along with her. She has truly experienced the value and importance of sharing and giving -- the two intertwined components of being part of a community.

Ana's story is evidence that participation in social media is a first step in innovating our teaching approaches.Do you have a similar story? We'd love to hear it!

Kindling the Fire of Teaching Innovation

2011-06-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I had the pleasure to visit with faculty at Governors State University in Illinois and share my story about how my participation in digital media, prompted by recovery from open heart surgery, inspired me to innovate my students' online and face-to-face learning environments. My presentation is available on Slideshare here. GSU is another example of a college or university opening the door to a conversation that explores the possibilities of web 2.0 and social media in college classes.

During the discussion following my presentation, a faculty member asked me if I typically see more innovation at 2-year institutions or at 4-year institutions. I understood the question to be probing about whether or not institutions that require faculty to regularly publish their work are undercutting the potential of innovation. In other words, if faculty are required to publish their research, will they also be as willing and motivated to innovate their teaching approaches (great question).

I don't have a definitive answer to that. But I do think the rate and depth of teaching innovation that occurs across a campus hinges upon an institution's values and priorities and the question has got me thinking about how we all could/should play a role in fostering teaching innovations.

A Smoldering Fire
Here's what I see. Each college or university I have visited with (or had conversations with remotely) demonstrates the presence of fascinating innovations in teaching and learning. I often hear from individual professors about things they are trying in their classes -- they reach out for feedback and ideas (they're thirsty for a community that is not present at their instutition). I believe classroom innovation is all around us. The real problem is that colleges aren't making it a priority to facilitate the spread of this innovation (and that's really the easy part).

To me, each college or university is like a smoldering fire. From a distance, we see wafts of smoke and upon a closer look, we observe a collection of separate, glowing embers. If we leave those embers alone, they will burn for awhile but will eventually extinguish. But if we "poke" them, their energy will transfer and the heat will grow stronger, ultimately leading to a crackling blaze.

The key here is the "poking." "Poking" is a term Seth Goldin has used in his analysis of innovation. In higher education, we need more pokers and, fortunately, there are many ways you can become one.

1. Share
First and foremost, if you represent one of those embers, you are the most vital poker. If you aren't already, the educational community needs you to share your work -- your ideas, activities, and student feedback. Your passion and energy are vital to inspiring others to experiment with new approaches in teaching.

Start a blog and write about what you are doing...even if you have no idea what your next post will be. And/or use your webcam to start recording short YouTube videos. Create an account on YouTube and start participating in a weekly Twitter chat (#edchat is a great one). The opportunities to participate are endless. But participate and share you must. It is your duty and we will all be grateful for it.

If you feel reluctant, keep in mind that you don't need polished ideas before you share them. Share your rough ideas, your theories, your questions, your classroom stories -- you'll begin to be more motivated and inspired by the community of learners you attract to your blog. They will become pokers for you (just as you are for me). As you share and become part of the online community of teaching innovators, you will find that your ideas will flourish and grow in ways you hadn't imagined. Sharing your ideas will make your a stronger and more dynamic teacher.

2. Incentivize
So, what if you aren't a fiery ember but you see the potential and the need for innovation in teaching and learning? Maybe you're a dean, a provost, a college president, a gallery director, an instructional aid, faculty development coordinator, a counselor, a business analyst -- no matter what your role is at your institution, we need you to play a role on your campus in incentivizing innovation. Get involved with your shared governance process and begin a conversation about "innovation." Incrementally, each incentive (even the smallest) will begin to foster a culture the encourages and values a faculty member's participation in digital media.

Service for Sharing
Faculty at 4-year institutions are incentivized to publish by tying it to tenure and by recognizing faculty for their published work. What if presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs developed a method or process for recognizing faculty contributions to innovation through digital media? Cathy Davidson has probed this topic and suggested that blogs should count towards "service" rather than count for absolutely nothing.

ePortfolio for Faculty Applications & Tenure Advancement
Recently I applied for a faculty position and observed how the very process of hiring faculty devalues participation and sharing of one's teaching scholarship through digital media. The application asked for a list of "publications" but nowhere did it offer me an opportunity to share my digital work -- my blog, videos, educational guides, guest blog work, LinkedIn profile and professional network, or Twitter community. The application -- which, by the way, was print based, rendering all links and media irrelevant -- allowed me to showcase just the tip of the iceberg of my teaching scholarship.

The same holds true for tenure advancement processes that are based on review of print-based portfolios. They render the value of digital contributions obsolete.

What if, in addition to a list of publications, the employment application and tenure advancement review process required the submission of an ePortfolio? This may include a space for a blog or website url and number of Twitter followers, LinkedIn recommendations, shared videos and other digital resources shared with a Creative Commons license with embedded hyperlinks to each one. Would this change foster greater participation and sharing in digital media from instructors who are seeking employment? Would it, over time, change the demographic of future college professors?

How do you think these changes would be received at your institution and why? Has your institution adopted these changes or something similar? Please share the results with us in a comment.

3. Recognize
If I were a college leader, I would make innovation in teaching an institutional priority and creating a culture that values risk-taking and experimentation in the classroom. I would spend one hour each term with one faculty who demonstrates a commitment to innovation. The facuty member would be identified through a collaborative peer-rating process (perhaps facilitated by Faculty Development) that would invite the campus -- administrators, faculty, support staff, and students -- to vote for the innovator of their choice. The casual interview would be recorded and shared online (with a Creative Commons license) in my own blog with the entire campus community and beyond.

Over time, the blog would include a collection of resources, and teaching ideas about innovation alongside posts about other important administrative topics. The point here is that teaching innovations need to central and recognized by leaders, rather than hidden or they will burn out. Leaders need to be part of the active conversation about teaching innovation in order for it to be understood as an institutional value.

4. Use the "I" Word
Once I was asked to come up with a new name for a faculty support department. When I responded with a name that included the phrase "teaching innovations," the administrator said "no" because it sounded like a program that would be eliminated. Does your institution use the word innovation in the titles of any committees, positions, journals, summits, conferences, retreats, etc.? Maybe it should.

Cisco Virtual Education Forum: full of great ideas!

2011-06-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

Cisco is sponsoring a free Virtual Education Forum, crafted in a beautiful design and packed with loads of great videos from educators around the world, opportunities to chat with other members, and loads of other resources.

Visit the forum here (free registration is required):

www.inxpo.com/events/ciscoeduforum

While you're there, check out my 15-minute video, "Expanding the Funnel: Increasing Degree Attainment Through Teaching Innovations." You can find it in the forum by entering the "Exhibit Hall" and visiting the "Next Generation Teaching and Learning" Booth.

"Is Anyone Listening to Students?"

2011-05-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

Julie Evans of Project Tomorrow, administrator of the annual Speak Up survey,
moderates a panel of students before the Congressional Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee. Students address why education technology is critical to their future.

Kids Like Blogs (Did you hear that teachers??)

2011-05-26T13:37:00.000-07:00

From time to time I receive emails about cool new tools I should check out or requests to grant another author the opportunity write on my blog. I enjoy those interactions (although still feel like this blog is my personal space to write and share -- which is why I've declined the guest blog posts). But today I received a pretty special email that propelled me directly here to my blog to share with you.

When I speak with educators about transforming learning through technology, I hear all the reasons why we "can't" or why it's too "hard" to transform the way we have our students reach their learning objectives or standards. But every now and then, we find an example of a "mover" who makes it happen. A person driven from within by a passion for learning that is uninterrupted by all the hurdles that others stumble over.

Today I was introduced to the Kids Like Blogs project, a product of Mr. Schwartz who teaches 4th and 5th grade in Oceanside, CA. The concept sounds pretty simple: each child was set up with an individual blog, carefully and securely utilizing anonymity, on which s/he would write 90 words each day. These were kids who were not only reluctant to write but wouldn't write. The kids quickly learned that writing for an authentic audience holds more extrinsic value when they began to track the number of hits and comments they received. That extrinsic motivation triggered an intrinsic response -- and a new found love for writing. And Mr. Schwartz, a blogger himself, kept his students' privacy and security a priority by approving each blog post and each comment before they appeared online.

Wrapped up in this success story is a close partnership with parents who are educated about the value of blogging and also give permission before a child can participate. Now here's the part that really floored me. Many of the students participating in the project come from homes where the parents only speak Spanish. The children, English language learners, are showcasing their writing online and their literacy and self-confidence is soaring. Why does that surprise me so? Because this is yet another hurdle that I frequently hear cited for not using technology based projects. The fact that Mr. Schwartz believes in, not only, his students but also the parents of his students and opens the door for them to demonstrate their potential is golden.

Here are a couple of parent testimonials:

"Prior to entering Mr. Schwartz’s class, my son didn’t like to write. It was
pulling teeth to simply get him to write a paragraph for his 3rd grade
class project. When he joined Mr. Schwartz’s class in the fall, he was
informed that daily writing was part of his homework, and he started
becoming much more comfortable – but he’d still count every word and do
it at the last possible moment.

Now that the blog is up and running, my son is able to access it at home,
and suddenly I have a little boy who’s “just doing the blog part” of his
homework as soon as he gets home from school, and who becomes more
comfortable with writing every day. This comfort with writing and
presenting his work has extended to other areas, and I couldn’t be more
pleased. My son is learning to think of his computer as a tool, not
just a toy, and is gaining skills that he will use throughout his life."

This example demonstrates so many different things but let's not miss the critical element of Schwartz's own participation in the blogging community. Educators who blog need to be rewarded. Education leaders need to incentivize participation in social media, as participation is the only way to truly comprehend the learning value of the tools that comprise the web 2.0 era.

Thank you, Mr. Schwartz, for sharing your terrific project with me! Keep up the great work (same goes for your students and their parents).

Creative Commons: Essential Info for Every 21st Century Educator

2011-05-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

I truly believe this topic is essential for every single person involved in education today. Please share this post with your colleagues.

I hope you'll join me on Thursday, June 2nd at 12noon Pacific for this terrific Online Teaching Conference 2011 Kick Off event! What? Still not registered for the conference? It's not too late! Click here for registration details.

Creative Commons:
Opening the Door to Sharing Content in Education
by Jane Park, Education Coordinator Creative Commons

Thursday June 2 at 12noon (Pacific)
Sign in at: http://cccconfer.org/MyConfer/GoToMeetingAnonymousely.aspx?MeetingSeriesID=0c08525c-1905-4077-bb49-178e6f98bcc2

Have you even been frustrated trying to use materials created by others or share your own content without having to consult a legal team to unravel copyrights? The Internet promises universal access to education, but its potential is hindered by archaic copyright laws and incompatible technologies. Creative Commons (CC) works to minimize these barriers by providing licenses and tools that anyone can use to share their educational materials with the world. CC licenses make textbooks and lesson plans easy to find, easy to share, and easy to customize and combine — helping to realize the full benefits of digitally enabled education. Find out more about CC and how you can use CC licenses to share your work, find free educational resources online, and collaborate with other educators to build and improve learning materials.

Does Social Media Violate Student Privacy?

2011-05-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

This month on the GetInsight blog, I have a blog post shared that explores the issue of student privacy and social media. The post traces the often tenuous relationship between FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) and a student's use of social media for class assignments and activities. This is a topic that is often bewildering and concerning to professors and, frequently, one of the reasons faculty cite for not pursuing the use of social media in their teaching approaches.

This blog post is offered as a resource to facilitate a conversation around this topic -- both here and at your local institutions. I invite you to read the post and contribute a comment to the VoiceThread below. If you're new to VoiceThread, don't feel intimidated. Any comment you leave can easily be deleted and re-recorded/written before it is shared publicly.

Read the blog post here.

Time For An Extreme Syllabus Make-Over?

2011-05-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

"The Syllabus"...the single most important document a professor shares with her students. Professors spend hours perfecting each syllbus through rigorous revisions and each semester stress the importance of reading it to their students. But how closely do students read it? How effective is it at communicating critical details, as well as high level information about your course? And are you leveraging the maximum learning potential of a syllabus -- can it be more than just a reference resource?

The Value of Visual Communication
A syllabus is a reference resource that can easily span 5, 6, 7 or more pages. Most reference resources produced today outside of higher education are designed with a blend of text and images. Compare a college textbook published in 2011 with one published in 1995. You'll find a significant increase in the visual diagrams, colored call out boxes, and icons used throughout the chapters. These often function to summarize main points and weave information back and forth through a text, in an effort to facilitate connections between ideas and foster critical thinking. Images and icons are also utilized to communicate information in a secondary way, guide the eye through the content, and call out important details. Would your students consider your syllabus a more meaningful, helpful resource if it too integrated thoughtful images and graphics along with text?

Several years ago, I transformed my 10-page, black-and-white, text-based syllabus into a visual gem. Students responded with gratitude. One student wrote to me on the first day of class, "I can tell you really care about your teaching." I found it was quite amazing how quickly my careless typos were found too (evidence that they were reading it!).

More Than Meets the Eye
But aside from the aesthetically pleasing qualities of designing syllabi with images and text, the National Center on Universal Design for Learning encourages "providing multiple means of representation" in the design and development of learning environments: "[L]earning, and transfer of learning, occurs when multiple representations are used, because it allows students to make connections within, as well as between, concepts."

In my syllabus redesign, I integrated images of my students at art galleries and museums -- standing in front of art works of all shapes and sizes -- in an effort to make their entrance into the class more relevant. I also included thumbnail size images of artworks that we'd study throughout the class. By referencing the syllabus throughout the term, students would realize and reflect on what they had learned about the images, gaining a deeper understanding of how context informs interpretation.

Resources
If you'd like to consider a syllabus make-over, you may enjoy the following shared resources:

Educator's Guide to a 21st Century Syllabus
Sample Visual Syllabus

Innovate 2011 Keynote, Ohio State

2011-04-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

This morning I had the pleasure and honor to present the keynote at Ohio State's Innovate 2011 conference. At the request of the participants, I have shared the presentation on Slideshare. You may view and/or download the PDF here and it's also embedded below.

To view many of the media resources shared in the presentation, please visit the Shared Resources page of my blog (or just click on the Shared Resources tab above).

Thanks to all who attended and please keep in touch. I would love to learn more about your own learning innovations. And, finally, this was the most active Twitter backchannel I've ever experienced during a presentation. I love it! If you have any lingering questions you'd like to ask, feel free to leave them here as a comment and I'd be happy to respond.

Follow the conference on Twitter at: #InnovateOSU

Teaching in the Age of Participation

View more presentations from Michelle Pacansky-Brock

Raw Passion: Innovation in Teaching

2011-04-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

As our educational committee continues to encourage innovations in teaching, it's important that we consider the emotional journey wrapped up in experimentation. Innovation demands risk-taking and this can be a scary step for professors, who are viewed as experts and authorities. How can we leverage our raw passion to get through the murky waters that lead to new, exciting learning environments?

This month in my GETideas.org blog post, I explore this topic in "Raw Passion: Innovation in Teaching." I invite you to read the blog post and contribute to the related VoiceThread reflection.

If you're new to VoiceThread, here how to leave a comment:

click on "Sign in or Register"
register for your free account
click on "Comment"
select your preferred commenting method from the options on the screen (microphone, webcam, text, or phone)
click "Save"

Teaching with Social Media Tips: Student Privacy

2011-04-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a new blog post for GETideas.org which will cover many topics but one of them is the issue of facilitating student privacy when teaching with social media. Stay tuned for the full context but here is a new "guide" I've added to my Shared Resources tab if you're interested.

Download a PDF of this document here.

Living with Rigorous Passion

2011-04-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Four years ago I was at a national conference about college level teaching. The focus was sharing "effective, new approaches" to learning. I was attending a session in which a professor was demonstrating how she had integrated video segments into her students' learning modules, in an effort to engage more diverse learners and increase engagement. Today, that doesn't sound like such an earth breaking idea and that's not why I remember the session so vividly. It's what happened next that sticks with me. An audience member, seated a few seats down from me, was holding her hand up high, clearly fighting back her desire to say something. The presenter paused and called upon her. The audience member spoke, almost angrily, "Where is the rigor in that?!"

What followed was an awkward exchange between the presenter and the clearly annoyed professor who had asked the question. The participant went on to demand, "We need to be requiring rigorous experiences for our college level students." I remember sitting there, watching this exchange, thinking to myself, "What the hell is this really about?"

After four years of chewing on that experience, it's a little more clear to me. In the United States, we are confused about the essential underpinnings of of education. I've learned through my experiences as a student in K12, college and graduate school but more so through watching my two boys proceed through public elementary school.

Early on, we teach our children to sit, to write, to take multiple choice tests, to read books not for enjoyment and imagination but to score high on the multiple choice test that follows. Oh, and by the way, earn enough points on those tests to be recognized amidst your peers or publicly crucified in front of your friends as one of those who couldn't make it into the 100 point club. It's heart wrenching.

These activities slowly teach our children that what matters to them -- what they love to do, what makes them happy -- is not an important part of an education. We teach our children that to be successful in life, we must experience misery. Now don't get me wrong -- misery is different from hard work. And I would bet many people who has or who has had kids understands what I mean by this. Kids will work endlessly to defeat a level in a video game, including going online to tap into communities and collaborate with gamers to understand how to advance. They'll wake up at 2am to go online to harvest their potato crop in an effort to feed their crew of zombies and invade the local farmers. They'll spend hours remixing videos with alternative audio tracks to express an opinion about something they feel strongly about. But we continue to teach them that these things don't matter -- they're just superfluous, meaningless activities that will get you nowhere in life. Now if we have a child who locks herself in her room for hours at a time to read novel after novel, that's a different story -- right? We have biases against learning digital media that are silently destroying our childrens' passion. And these biases are preventing us from seeing the potential to use digital media in public schools -- not to harvest zombie crops but to teach core competencies.

When I was young, I was fortunate to have parents who taught me to do what I loved. When I got to college, I struggled in my large lectures classes. I got great grades and ended up graduating Cum Laude. But I didn't truly learn much in most of my classes that I was required to take. I see now that grades in most college classes really do not equate to learning. They are more aligned with seat time and how effectively you can memorize facts.

You may argue that I got such good grades because I was an Art major and then received a graduate degree in Art History -- geez, I mean, where's the rigor in that, right? Well, my studies in art and art history taught me to see the world differently. I learned how to value ideas that change the course of humanity, ideas that get shunned and disregarded as irrelevant by the mainstream until they slowly take hold and begin their slow disruption.

My experiences as a student in art and art history also taught me how I learn best. As a student, I was drawn to studying a visual discipline because I could understand it. I remember feeling lost, confused, and stupid in my lecture classes that never integrated visual imagery. Again, I did fine in those classes but only after spending countless hours agonizing on my own, with my books, taking laborious notes and figuring things out on my own. I see now that it was the "rigor" that turned me off to other disciplines. I worked hard in my art classes, learning how to draw, how to comprehend color and spatial relationships, how to create photographs of my surroundings in black and white and color, how to manipulate imagery in digital form, and how to understand the ways that images in my daily life are constructed to manipulate me. It made me feel alive. It made me feel talented. It encouraged me to find my voice. It made me feel good about myself. It made me want to live with rigorous passion.

If you can relate, you may enjoy checking out Sir Ken Robinson's new book, "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative."

More Word Cloud Fun with Tagxedo

2011-03-30T16:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how this one got passed me for so long! If you like Wordle, you'll love Tagxedo.com. It provides you the ability to mold your words into visual shapes like flowers, hearts, President Lincoln, birds, etc. Fun stuff...because we need fun stuff.

Here is my Tagxedo word cloud of my blog. This image shared using the Tagxedo "code snippet." You should know that using Tagxedo requires one to download and install Silverlight (unless you already have it, of course).

Have fun all. :)

VoiceThread Universal: Support for Screenreaders

2011-03-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

Three and a half years ago I began using VoiceThread to support my students' learning. I quickly began to see how VoiceThread supports more learners than traditional text-based discussion forums. Studetnts are given options to contribute through voice, video or text -- supporting more learning preferences and fostering more emotional, "off the cuff" reflections that are typically edited out when communicating through text alone. It also gave me a quick and easy way to communicate with my students through voice and video -- providing personalized, helpful and supportive feedback without the hurt feelings that text-based communications can result in.

I can't remember when exactly but soon after I learned that VoiceThread did not support the use of screen readers, a type of accessible technology used by blind students to navigate and understand the electronic content on their screen. I remember sharing this concern with Ben Papell and Steve Muth, the co-founders, more than three years ago. I didn't stop using VoiceThread, however, because I was seeing its potential to improve my online students' learning experiences and I wasn't going to let that go. Instead, I started surveying my students and asking for their feedback about how and why VoiceThread was different and beneficial as a learning environment. The results were staggering to me. I also saw other inspirational uses of VoiceThread by non-traditional learners, like the video conversation between deaf students facilitated by Rosemary Stifter. I witnessed my own dyslexic students use the video commenting feature and contribute amazing insights -- the same students who are commonly perceived as "failures" in distance learning classes built exclusively around text-based discussion boards.

These experiences made me aware of how frequently educators throw the baby out with the bathwater when they discover a tool is not fully 508 compliant. While I wholeheartedly support the spirit of web accessibility, if we refuse our obligation to explore and experiment with new tools that are not compliant, how will we discover which ones provide valuable opportunities to empower more learners (while aren't yet ready for ALL learners?).

This week, VoiceThread is unveiling VoiceThread Universal, a version of VoiceThread that is accessible to screen readers. The official announcement from VoiceThread should go out Tuesday morning (tomorrow). I am elated and wish to applaud the VoiceThread team for their hard work and dedication to making their tool more accessible to more learners than any other online tool I've ever used. You can take a peek at the new VoiceThread Universal here. More bells and whistles are coming...but, for now, our students who rely upon screenreaders can now effectively navigate a VoiceThread -- click play, listen to comments, record their own -- and learn in community. They now will have the experience of listening to the voices of their peers describe the visual media on each VoiceThread slide, rather than a mechanical voice read an alt-description of an image on their screen. I have not tried the interface out myself with a screen reader but I'd really love to hear some feedback and thoughts from any of you who may be able/willing to do so.

Finally, I have one final thought about this journey (which will continue, rather than end, here). I frequently hear educators state that we (faculty, administrators, staff -- all of "us") should ban technologies that aren't accessible to prove a "point" about the importance of 508 compliance in the age of online technologies. I'd like to suggest a different path. I believe, alternatively, we need to see ourselves as stakeholders in a very important conversation about accessibility. We are advocates for our students. Most developers of social media tools don't view their jobs in this context -- it's our job to educate them, show them the value of their tools in student learning, and encourage them to develop accessible interfaces (sometimes even explain what that means exactly). We need to initiate and guide this conversation. The strong-arm approach won't work here. These tools are not created "for education," yet we know many web-based tools frequently hold tremendous value for crafting relevant learning experiences for our students. This is a conversation that we need to participate in, follow up on, and make a priority in our professional endeavors. I hope you'll join me in this conversation and share your own success stories along the way.

The Social Media Irony in Education

2011-03-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

Today I am attending the CUE Conference in Palm Springs. This is my second year attending CUE and I continue to be impressed with the energy, knowledge and curiosity of the fabulous presenters.

Here's an ironic observation I made today. Most of the educational technology conferences I attend are geared towards higher education. At those conferences, just like here at CUE, the sessions frequently showcase ways to use social media in support of learning. But when I listen to the comments made by K12 teachers and compare them to comments made at higher ed conferences by college professors, I notice a very interesting difference.

K12 teachers voice frustration over their inability to have students participate in or with social media sites (Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) because they're blocked by their institution. In essence, the "openness" of the online environment is viewed as "dangerous" to students so the sites are blocked. In contrast, college professors commonly say, "I can't/won't use that because it's too open" referring to concerns over violating student privacy.

The point here is that K12 teachers are advocating for the need to use social media tools in support of learning -- in an open environment -- because it's the only way we can begin to educate our students how to communicate and socialize online (sort of an important skill in 21st century life). Today's opening keynote featured a teacher from Australia who noted his country's open policy around using social media in schools and said, "Shutting students out would be just silly." And, on the flip side, we have college educators voicing concerns about using social media for learning because of the risks of violating student privacy (FERPA). So, let me get this straight. Those who are unable to use it, want to and those who are able to use it, don't want to use it. Hmm. Sounds like we have something to talk through.

I'd love to hear from some of you who have social media use policies in place at your institutions (k12 or higher ed) or may be working on one. Please share! Help us all learn together.

Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture (ADEC Summit Presentation)

2011-03-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

Today I am presenting at the 22nd ADEC (Association for Distance Education in California) Summit in Palm Springs. I have shared a (static) version of my presentation on Slideshare. You may view it below or on Slideshare.

Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture

View more presentations from Michelle Pacansky-Brock

The Life of a 21st Century Educator in 90 Seconds

2011-03-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

How does it feel to be a member of the educational community in the 21st century? This 90-second video encapsulates it perfectly for me. It also captures the importance of risk taking, experimentation, and the ultimate goal -- creating dynamic, effective, successful learning experiences for our students.

Twitter for Social Presentations & Information Curation

2011-03-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

I am reaching new levels of understanding the significance of Twitter on education.

Keeping in line with my interest in leveraging social media to make learning more, well, social, I've been intrigued by some ideas I've seen shared on Twitter and other blogs that highlight the importance of participating in a Twitter backchannel while you are presenting. I fully agree that this both stimulates greater discussion and breaks down the formal hierarchy between "presenter" and "audience" (an important element of social/participatory learning). The question I've had is "how"?

I was really thrilled when I found Keynote Tweet back in January, a simple script that a user can download and integrate into a Keynote presentation which allows for tweets to be sent automatically when a slide is played in presenter mode. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful at using it and have since read that a recent Twitter API update has rendered the tool dead. Boo. Powerpoint users have more options (double boo, as I'm not a PP user) and you can check out those options on Jane Hart's blog.

While I really like the idea of auto-tweets being sent in sync with slides, as it is more likely to promote relevant discussion in step with the thoughts brewing in the room at the time, I'm going to have to shift gears until I find a replacement for Keynote Tweet. If you know of one, please share!

As an alternative idea, I'm going to schedule tweets using one of the many free tools that provide this service. The two I've played with recently include Twuffer, twAitter, and LaterBro. The concept is simple. Sign in with your Twitter account, type your tweet (remember, 140 characters or less), and select the date/time you want it to be sent. That's it...really. The only other critical thing to remember is to include the appropriate hashtag in every tweet and share that hashtag in your presentation (in the corner of every slide, for example). The hashtag ("#" followed by a sequence of letters/numbers) is needed by the audience members to search for your tweets and reply to them.

Now this isn't a new concept in the cutting edge circles of social media but it is new to education (at least from my viewpoint). I see a lot of potential for this practice in presentation-driven environments like conferences but also in large lecture settings. I think about students who are unable to attend a class and how these tweets could keep them connected at a distance and even provide them with an opportunity to participate, in some way. The scheduled tweets could be questions you'd like to pose to students that may link back to earlier material or probe for opinions about topics.

Information Curation
What I'm not sure about right now is how successful this is going to be if the audience at the conference doesn't use Twitter. So, perhaps stressing the relevance of Twitter as both a popular tool and a path to developing an essential 21st century skill is a good approach.

Mashable reported yesterday that 450,000 new Twitter accounts are being created daily. 177 million tweets are sent each day or 1 billion each week. Twitter is more than annoying, superficial updates about banal activities. It's a rich resource for sharing resources with your peers, having resources sent to you, following interesting people and organizations -- ultimately, curating your own information feed.

Historically, a curator is a person who is granting an important role in a museum, designated as the one who will oversee the selection process of art works that will be included in a particular exhibition. Moving forward, living independently in the 21st century will require us all to be our own information curators. I always find it intriguing how much more relevant art-related skills are becoming in our digital, global society.

Encouraging or requiring our students to use Twitter to curate their own personal learning networks is one of the greatest contributions we can make to their toolkit of 21st century skills. But, first, we must step up, participate, and learn to curate our own.

Wanna play? Here's a good, basic "Getting Started on Twitter" overview written by Dave Fleet.

Don't Take My Stuff: Examining the Value of Sharing in Education

2011-03-10T12:38:00.000-08:00

This month I'm delving into a topic that, to me, is often be considered a "white elephant in the room." Throughout the past several years, I've facilitated many, many workshops for college faculty focused on demonstrating how to use the internet to find valid, engaging content for student learning, as well as how to use social media to share one's own work and make it more widely available to students and the public, and/or to construct learning activities for students to use these tools.

From my observations, I've found that faculty are generally intrigued and open to the idea of integrating web-based content into their students' learning. Many are excited about the possibilities of integrating social media into student learning. But when it comes to sharing one's own work, a different conversation begins.

I embrace each of these conversations, as I think they're essential to the future of our digital, mobile society. As we all learn together now in a community created through global contributions, the willingness to "share" and give back to this community is the energy and current that will sustain its effectiveness. Encouraging faculty to see the value of sharing and, better yet, to share their work with a Creative Commons license so the work explicitly communicates that using the work is ok as long as you attribute the creator and use it in the following ways...

What does the reluctance to share say about the values that are embedded in our educational system? Does this vary from K12 to higher ed? Have you shared your work? How, why and under what circumstances were you willing to do so? Do you feel motivated and encouraged to share? How would the challenges we face at this pivotal moment of educational transformation through technology be facilitated more effectively if we all openly shared with each other -- our ideas, our experiences, examples of our projects, our favorite lecture, etc?

I imagine you have a perspective, story or thought about this topic and I hope you'll share it with us. I invite you to read the blog post, Don't Take My Stuff: Examining the Value of Sharing in Education, and participate in the VoiceThread conversation below.

If you're new to VoiceThread, take this opportunity to try something new. There's no need to worry -- you can delete any comment you make by playing it back and clicking on the "garbage can" icon that will appear on your screen.

How to Leave a Comment in the VoiceThread:

Click on the “Sign in" or "Register” button.
- If you are new to VoiceThread, register for a free account using your e-mail address and name.
- If you have an existing account, sign in by entering your e-mail address and password.

When you are ready to participate, click on the “Comment” button.

To leave a voice comment with your computer’s microphone: Click on “Record.”

If prompted, click “Allow” and start talking.

When you are done, click on the red “OK, Start Talking” button.

Click “Save” to retain, "Cancel" to re-record, or "Record More" to add to your comment.

A Sample VoiceThread Rubric

2011-03-02T15:04:00.000-08:00

I understand how helpful samples are when experimenting with using new technologies for learning. Even after you have a clear picture of how you want to use a new tool in your class, you will soon ask, "Hmmm...and how am I going to grade the activity?"

Rubrics can be very helpful to instructors and students. When you develop a rubric for an assignment, it forces you to make important decisions about the criteria you will use to assign credit. It's helpful to make a brief list of the criteria categories (keep them simple and few for quick grading -- if there is such a thing) and then distribute a maximum number of points to each criteria category. Then ask yourself to identify what qualifies for "partial" and "full" points in each criteria category.

Share each rubric with your students before the activity begins so they have an opportunity to review what your expectations are. Include a note on the rubric to your students that clearly states you will be using the rubric to grade their activities/assignments. You'll find that this will dramatically reduce the "grade negotiation" sessions in your life and students will appreciate understanding exactly what you expect of them.

In an effort to help, I'm sharing a simple VoiceThread rubric that may be a resource for you or someone you know. I've shared it under a CC0 public domain mark which releases it into the public domain (i.e. you don't need to attribute me if you use it in your own class).

Click here to download the VoiceThread Rubric.

Why Grocery Shopping is Toxic

2011-02-28T17:27:00.000-08:00

I have just returned from my weekly trip to the grocery store and I feel sick.

I consider myself an active consumer, even though I tend to self-criticize myself for not shopping more at local farmer's markets and getting caught up in the food convenience maze. While I'm shopping, I think about how to deconstruct the grocery store lingo all the time -- shop the perimeters for the most "real" food, remember to decipher the following accurately: the difference between "light" and "lite," "low fat" and "reduced fat," "low sugar" and "no sugar added," etc.

But there is one element of grocery shopping that I continue to find more toxic than any single ingredient in the overly processed food we buy here in the United States. It's the experience of standing in line at the check out counter. Despite the fact that I do not purchase subscriptions to "women's magazines" (and I can't remember the last time I ever bought one), I regularly have some general sense of whose boyfriend Kim Kardashian is sleeping with, who last dumped Jennifer Aniston, how desperately they both want a baby, which female celebrities are pregnant, which are too fat or too thin, which have lost their baby fat the quickest and .... the ever coveted title, "the one who lost 10 pounds in two weeks" or "12 pounds in 30 days."

These magazines leave toxic effects on anyone and everyone who passes through the check out line, leaving no opportunity to avoid them if one chooses to shop at these stores. The $5-7 we spend on each one is not a form of entertainment. Rather, it's an opportunity for the media to spotlight and reward women for being a temptress, never being single, and starving herself while scorning those who choose to not have a man in her life, choose to not have a child, choose to focus on raising her newborn child rather than getting "her body back," or choosing to embrace her body in its natural form.

The truth is that women are never empowered to have "their own body" in this image-driven, look-at-me society which is getting more and more intensified with the continued popularity of reality shows like The Real Housewives of ________ (enter any city name here -- it really doesn't matter!), Toddlers and Tiaras, The Bachelor, etc. Even "the beautiful ones" must alter their appearance to be beautiful and then their appearance is still heavily touched upon in Photoshop (wrinkles and pores vanish, bust lines are enhanced, and slim waist lines are carved away).

Like the paintings and sculptures of women that adorn the walls of the world's acclaimed art museums, our bodies today -- in real, 3d form and in images -- are still carved, chiseled, and sculpted into an ideal that has been constructed over thousands of years to fulfill the desires of men. We exist to be looked at and, in turn, our actions are undervalued and our opportunities to participate, explore, and change the world are diminished.

Of course, these magazines will never cease from being displayed, for our economy relies too heavily upon women to feel like crap about themselves. The worse we feel about ourselves, the more money we spend on products and services to make us look and act more like those who are idealized and celebrated on the covers of magazines.

In fact, in recent years, despite our country being in the midst of the worst economic crumble since the Great Depression, we've seen the emergence of an entire new industry: The Med Spa. Where women, now as young as their mid-20s, are "empowered" to spend hundreds of dollars to reclaim their once wrinkle-free faces by being injected with the same poison that paralyzes -- and kills -- a human infected with botulism, among other invigorating "treatments." Meanwhile, eating disorders among pre-teens continue to rise and preschoolers demonstrate that they too have internalized the "fear of being fat" by associating "being pretty" not only with being thin but also with being "nice" and "having friends."

So, the question is...when, oh when, will we integrate media literacy into the foundation of education in the United States to put girls/women and boys/men, on a path to becoming visually literate so they can actively deconstruct these toxic gender messages and be encouraged to support a life in which women are encouraged to live independently and fully participate in this world that needs them so very much? Without the ability to view one's visual context critically, the underlying values that perpetuate the construction of gender in our society will continue to be silently internalized. And the check out line at your local grocery store will continue to remain toxic.

Revised VoiceThread "How To" Guides for Easier Sharing

2011-02-28T14:54:00.000-08:00

This week I revised my two Educator Guides to VoiceThread. They are now shared with new, more precise titles and no longer have my consulting logo on them. They are shared with a Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike license, to facilitate easier integrating and sharing with your peers and students.

1. How to Create a VoiceThread (former title: Educator's Guide to VoiceThread):
This guide provides clear, easy to follow steps for creating a private VoiceThread. Also included are handy tips for weaving in existing media from the New York Public Library and Flickr, as well as how to copy an existing VoiceThread to be reused in future classes.

2. How to Participate in a VoiceThread (former title: Introduction to VoiceThread):
Over the past few years, I have presented many, many workshops to professors and teachers about using VoiceThread for learning. One of the most common questions I receive is, "How do you teach your students how to use it?" This guide is essentially the precise handout I distribute to my own students. I've written it to a broad, generic audience so it can be re-used easily.

Both documents are also available on the Shared Resources tab of my blog.

Enjoy!

Teaching in the Era of Participation

2011-02-22T15:04:00.000-08:00

Lately my thoughts have been entangled in an interplay of excitement about the possibilities of emerging technologies in college learning and concern over the viewpoints of many faculty who characterize their students as "apathetic, disengaged, and lazy."

These reflections have pulled me into a new topic that I've shared in my GETideas.org blog post this month -- Teaching in the Era of Participation. I invite you to read the post here.

I also invite you to reflect on Michael Wesch's compelling new #VOST2011 collaborative video project which, to me, illuminates a student's perspective of how it feels to be a college student today, after growing up in a participatory era. Below is a VoiceThread I've created in an effort to showcase the first remix of Wesch's project (the videos used to create the remix were authored by actual college students in response to Wesch's call for submissions) and craft a space for educators to reflect on the project and the thoughts it leaves you with.

Finally, I'll be sharing more of my thoughts on Teaching in the Era of Participation as the keynote presenter for Ohio State's Innovate 2011 on April 27th and the Online Teaching Conference at Orange Coast College on June 24th. I'm excited about being invited to present at these great venues and look forward to meeting more inspirational educators in the months ahead.

I hope you'll join in on the conversation in the VoiceThread below:

How to Leave a Comment in the VoiceThread:

Click on the “Sign in" or "Register” button.
If you are new to VoiceThread, register for a free account using your e-mail address and name.
If you have an existing account, sign in by entering your e-mail address and password.
When you are ready to participate, click on the “Comment” button.
To leave a voice comment with your computer’s microphone:
Click on “Record.”
If prompted, click “Allow” and start talking.
When you are done, click on the red “OK, Start Talking” button.
Click “Save” to retain your comment.
Click “Cancel” to re-record your comment.
Click “Record More” if you’d like to add to resume recording and add to your existing comment.

Mobile Learning in College?

2011-01-24T17:00:00.000-08:00

Going Mobile
If you're connected to the dialogue around educational technology, you've undoubtedly heard the buzz about the possibilities and challenges of integrating mobile devices into our students' college experiences. Some colleges are excited and ready to experiment. Others are reluctant and still grappling with the implications of the internet on college learning.

An article shared this week in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, paints a portrait of college students who are waiting patiently for their professors and campus services to go mobile.

This month I shared a blog post on GETideas.org that examines the saturation of mobile devices around the globe and highlights some of the current projects and opportunities in this area. Please click here to read the blog post.

Let's Talk!
In an effort to bring this conversation forward, I've created a VoiceThread for professors, deans, provosts, IT directors, support staff and students. Do you have a mobile teaching idea to share? Is your campus working on a mobile project? Do you have concerns about the significant shift to mobile internet access that is upon us? Please join in and leave a comment.

How to leave a comment in the VoiceThread:
Please click on the image above to play my introductory comment. Then, to leave a comment in the VoiceThread:

Click on "Sign in or Register
If you are new to VoiceThread, register for a free account using your e-mail address and name.
If you have an existing account, sign in by entering your e-mail address and password.
Click on the “Comment” button.
To leave a voice comment with your computer’s microphone:
- Click on “Record.”

Want to share this VoiceThread? Copy this link: http://voicethread.com/share/1661202/

Learning Online is Like Dinner

2011-01-21T09:22:00.000-08:00

Online learning is a lot like eating dinner. It can be like a quick cruise through a drive through, providing a fast and convenient option for appeasing your hungry belly as you strive to meet the rest of your daily commitments.

Online learning can also be like eating a warm, delicious home cooked meal amidst a group of friends or family. This eating experience is different because sitting at the table involves more than just appeasing a hungry belly. It provides opportunities for conversation, reflection, sharing, and good hearty debate. Essentially, this meal involves being included in a community...even if just for a brief time.

Learning online is similar -- and each type of learning experience can serve a specific group of learners effectively. Unfortunately, online students too frequently crave the home cooked meal but, instead, are delivered a bag with a burger and fries.

Imagine showing up at your mom's house for a family dinner and being greeted with a bag of McDonald's at the front door. Imagine going to McDonalds for a quick bit and being expected to come in for an evening of conversation and discussion. You likely wouldn't appreciate either scenario.

I think it's time for students to understand the type of meal they'll receive before they register in an online class rather than unveiling it on day one.

What are you serving this semester?

Sharing Our Way to Learning Innovations

2011-01-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

Five years ago today I underwent open heart surgery to repair a faulty valve and an aneurysm in my aorta. Why on earth am I sharing this on my blog? Because that event, as physically and emotionally difficult as it was for me and my family, led to deep change in the way I teach and taught me some valuable lessons about the process of learning. I believe sharing is central to learning and learning is central to innovation.

At the time, I was a full-time professor of art history at a community college. It was my dream job...thought I'd never leave. I think many professors feel that way when they are hired into a full-time position. Tenure is as coveted as a winning lottery ticket in today's volatile economy and job market. But about a year and a half ago, I resigned from my tenured position and I now believe my heart surgery was the mark in my life that caused me to reevaluate what I was doing and where I was going both personally and professionally.

I'd imagine many people who are faced with the reality of never walking through their front door again can relate to this. I have shared with many people that the hardest part about my surgery was leaving my house at the crack of dawn and saying good-bye to my precious boys, who were only 3 and 5 at the time.

Derailments May Lead to Good Things
After my surgery, I was fortunate to have the support of my institution to take an entire semester off to recover. But after I was feeling better physically, I quickly realized that I don't cope very well with "time off." Without my teaching responsibilities and still not much energy, I found myself spending a lot of time online. Remember, this was 2006 -- a year after YouTube's introduction, before the mainstream of Facebook, and during the iPod craze. I watched archived conference presentations online for the first time ever. That was a huge mindshift -- you don't have to be there to learn. I began listening to educational podcast series featuring terrific interviews between educators who were debating something called Wikipedia and talking about some crazy new authoring tool called a blog. The phrase "web 2.0" was introduced into my life. At the time, I had no idea how these ideas would inspire me.

My surgery and my time off from teaching completely derailed my from my routine -- and that's what enabled me to learn new things. This is something all educators need in this time of digital, mobile transformation. Instead, faculty continue to take on more and more work and have and less time to immerse themselves in our participatory society.

In addition to the unraveling of my "you must be there to hear/listen/watch/learn" values, I taught myself how to podcast and began to record lectures for my classes the following semester. I was so excited about the idea of having my online students be able to hear my voice. Wow. Soon thereafter, I discovered VoiceThread and felt elated about the ability to construct online conversations in voice around visual media -- rather than using text to talk about text (which doesn't jive when you're teaching art history). A lot was shifting for me and I was about to embark upon a complete reinvention of my teaching and my students' learning -- first online and then face-to-face.

While most faculty were asking, "Is online as good as face-to-face?" I began to ask, "Why isn't face-to-face as good as online?"

Learning in Community
Another important learning experience occurred in the weeks prior to my surgery. I had learned quite a bit about valvular disorders and my surgery from my cardiologist and surgeon. I had even held a prototype of the valve that would be installed inside my chest. Despite all the facts and figures I had been provided with, I wasn't ready for this surgery. Again, I found myself online -- looking, searching for something. Then I found it. A website called valvereplacement.com. At the time, I considered it "just a website" but now I know it was an early form of a social network. After I joined, I was able to connect with other people just like me who had either gone through the surgery I was about to have or had it on their horizon. I "found" a woman in Australia who was my age, had my condition, and also had two boys of her own. As she shared her story and I shared mine, I realized I had found what I was seeking. I found a community of people who shared my experiences. A place to connect, discuss and express oneself. Yes, I had a fabulous community of friends and family by my side the whole way, but this online community brought me something that I felt was missing.

As an online instructor, that single lesson has stuck with me the most. I wasn't online looking for "information" about heart surgery. I was online trying to "learn" about heart surgery. Processing information is part of learning but there's more to learning than understanding facts. Learning is social and the online community I found fostered that missing link for me. Communities don't exist without sharing and that's exactly what online technologies, at the time, were beginning to foster. That experience inspired me to seek out tools and methods for establishing that type of "togetherness" in my online classes. In the following years I had success achieving a stronger sense of community through a blending of VoiceThread and Ning.

Sharing is Innovating
After a few years of reinventing all my course content and my pedagogy, I felt an urgent prodding inside me that was holding me accountable for living genuinely. I was constantly asking myself if I was happy, if I was doing what I should be doing, if I was where I wanted to be. I knew I loved teaching. But I really, truly wanted to share my teaching methods with other teachers. I wanted to be a bigger part of transforming education.

I am now an independent consultant. I am fortunate to be involved with many exciting projects...really fortunate. I've met so many inspiring innovators in the past year and a half and my life has been enriched by them. I've met people who have been inspired by my own blog, which continues to drive me. But what I've learned about me is that I am a teacher and without my students in my life, I feel a void.

Ultimately, I know there are other educators out there like me -- maybe not who have had heart surgery --- but who thrive in a culture of innovation and who may be questioning whether or not being in a full-time, tenured faculty role is the right career for them. That's a hard inner dialogue to have. Here's what I'd share with you: know that educators like you are essential to evoking change. You can change the world from a classroom. When you innovate in your classroom, your students notice and that will stick with them -- "She taught differently and it was amazing." Professors/teachers are role models and when you innovate, you not only teach your students the necessary learning outcomes for your class, but you also teach them the value of taking a risk and trying something new. Our students need more of this modeling in their educational careers.

What's critical is that you share what you're doing in your classes ... through a blog, Twitter, a social network, conference presentations (that YOU should record and share if it's not done for you), through YouTube videos...whatever works for you. You have many options. There are many teachers out there who are thirsty for great ideas. And understand that the changes you inspire may not be visible at first and don't let that frustrate you, as they may begin like a seed planted in a grand forest or subtle ripples in vast, tranquil waters. But that seed will slowly grow and those ripples will continue to spread and take on new forms, well beyond what you will be aware of.

Technology in Learning: Is it Worth it?

2010-12-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

I had to share this fabulous debate between two educators, Dina Strasser and Bill Ferriter, about whether or not technology infused learning improves or denigrates education. A great read, surely to provoke a hearty discussion.

What do you think? Is opening your classroom to the world via the Internet a 21st century necessity? Or is it more important to make sure students are fully engaged in their own regions and hometowns? And if you believe there’s a balance, what does that look like?

Read Bill and Dina's viewpoints here.

Mobile Think Tank: An Evening of Sharing & Inspiring

2010-12-10T16:23:00.000-08:00

Last night I had the tremendous pleasure of facilitating the Mobile Learning Think Tank workshop at Pasadena City College, which was the brainchild of Rachel Fermi of PCC. It was an evening of sharing teaching experiments and inspiring new ways of thinking about learning through the use of social media and mobile applications (or both).

Ideas Really Do Grow On Trees
by Michael Kieley
The evening opened with a presentation from Michael Kieley from Loyola Marymount who shared an activity idea from his class Visual Thinking. Michael took us through a visual journey about the power of mindmapping to facilitate brainstorming and organic blossoming of new ideas. Kieley has taught his class for more than a decade in a traditional face-to-face setting. I was honored (and inspired) to hear that he transformed his entire class after hearing my presentation last spring, Painting, Power and Pedagogy, at EduSoCal10. (And I should note that he attended the presentation virtually through the online UStream session...applause for the potential of technology here to engage remote audiences!) Since then he has blended web-based technologies into his students learning, including student-generated podcasts and VoiceThreads. That's an awesome feeling.

Mindmaps are visual renderings that begin with topic in the center, surrounded by sprouts that bifurcate into smaller branches. Participating in this growth-oriented, organic model of thinking, which is found plentifully in nature (trees, rivers, etc.), pulls students out of their linear thought pattern and dislocates the human (or should I say "adult") tendency to accept the first idea that "sounds good."

Michael shared how he offers students the option to use MindNode, a mobile app, to create mind maps on the fly from anywhere at anytime. I'm intrigued by the app and love that it offers a simple mind map creation process (drag, drop, label) and then offer the option to import the maps into a desktop to integrate hyperlinks, images, etc. Here is Michael's presentation from last night. Enjoy.

Map Storming

Welcome to our Classroom Dr. Spivey!
by Lori Rusch

The award for student empowerment and inspiration goes to Lori Rusch for her enriching presentation about a Skype-based, student-organized and facilitated interview of a world renown art historian, Dr. Nigel Spivey. You may know Dr. Spivey from his engaging PBS video series, How Art Made the World (and if you don't, check it out!).

Rusch is a self-proclaimed "Freeway Flyer," a term used frequently in higher ed to describe the reality of part-time instructors who teach at multiple campuses, typically with no office and limited to no access to campus resources and often no clarity about the existence of their job from term to term. Lori's dedication to teaching and learning was evident long prior to her presentation. It was actually here on my blog several months ago when she wrote to me about this amazing student-driven project -- so it was quite a treat to hear the story in person and meet her.

The "event" that she shared was not part of her lesson plan. It was the result of student curiosity and a passion for learning. The process began when Lori shared clips of "How Art Made the World" with her high World Art History students at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. The video series inspired quite a passion and curiosity about Dr. Spivey amongst the students -- who would imagine an art historian becoming a celebrity on a high school campus? Go figure. Rusch let this energy and wonder flow naturally on its own and one day, she proposed to her students that maybe the class could interview him. The students responded with looks of awe and asked, "Why would he want to talk to us?" She shared with them that Dr. Spivey is a professor -- a teacher -- at Cambridge University and if he is an educator, why would he not want to speak to a group of students? Then the conversation unraveled and resulted in the ultimate question -- "Could we do a video conference with him?" Isn't that a beautiful scene to imagine in your mind?

Next, the students drafted a long letter to Dr. Spivey and crowd sourcing their own interview questions in Facebook, all facilitated -- not managed or controlled -- by their awesome teacher. Dr. Spivey replied and accepted the invitation. Ms. Rusch elected to leverage Skype for the interview platform -- totally free -- and had a preliminary chat with Dr. Spivey to lay the groundwork.

The interview occurred on a Friday morning -- 2 hours before the students' classes actually began. Colleagues told Lori that she'd be lucky to "get two kids to show up." They were wrong, oh so wrong! Not only did students come but they packed the room. These students arrived to hear/see this interview because they were excited and inspired, not because they had to be there. All the myths and comments I've heard about students "these days" being apathetic and unwilling to do more than they're required to do are sunk by this story -- which, I think, is why I love it so much!

Below I'm sharing two resources that Lori shared with us: 1) a presentation showing screenshots of the Facebook group and promotional posters the students made to encourage campus participation at the interview and 2) a clip of the live interview which focuses on her amazing, inspirational students. BRAVO!

Welcome to our class Dr. Spivey.

Increasing Course Access and Communications with Blackboard Mobile Learn
by Roopa Mathur
Blackboard is the dominant course management system used throughout higher education (while this statistic, I believe, will continue to shift as open source software redefines institutional preferences and options for personalized learning). Despite the widespread use of Blackboard, many faculty aren't leveraging the option to share their course content with their students through the Blackboard Mobile Learn app.

Ms. Mathur shared an eloquent picture of what the app experience is for a student user and noted that delivering her content through the app requires "zero extra time" on her part -- an important point for faculty to realize. What I was impressed with was the ability to actually participate through the app, not just push content out to students. The discussion board feature of Blackboard is live and dynamic on an app, which is nice. But I do wonder how engaging in a discussion board through a mobile app changes the quality of the interactions. Personally, I moved away from discussion boards and towards blogging and VoiceThreads because I found most student participation too shallow in DBs. The rhythm of mobile access is quick and occurs in spurts -- these are questions I'm left with. While I like to interaction option, it seems like a microblog (like a Twitter status update) would be more appropriate than a discussion forum on a mobile app?? Thoughts?

Increasing Student Engagement in the Classroom with Poll Everywhere
by Sandra C. Haynes

Our final activity idea was shared by Sandra C. Haynes, of Pasadena City College. Ms. Haynes shared her personal experiences teaching large lecture classes to students who are increasingly more connected and interested in their cell phones than her art history lectures. This reminded me of a story that was shared by a session presenter at the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) Focus Session on Mobile Learning last spring. I read about this story in subsequent white paper written by Malcolm Brown and Victoria Diaz. There were two villages in China that each came up with unique solutions to the same problem. Each village devised its own method for managing the overflow of melting snow from the mountains at springtime. One village elected to construct dams, restricting the water's access to the village itself by forcing it out. The other chose to build channels throughout the village which would allow the water to run freely and, ultimately, become integrated into the village's landscape. This story is, of course, an analogy for the use of mobile devices in classes today. They are there. What to do with them is the question posed to faculty.

Well, Sandra has created effective channels in her teaching to welcome the use of cell phones by her students. She astutely noted that only a small percentage of her students own smart phones, which sharply contradicts the statistics shared in the 2009 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology that notes about half of higher ed students have smart phones. This point is important, as community college student demographics are unique and there are too few studies about technology ownership and use that focus explicitly on this student demographic (!).

So, in her quest for identifying a teaching activity using cell phones, her criteria was the use of a cell phone with SMS text messaging capabilities. She turned to Poll Everywhere which is a simple, web-based tool that offers the option to create poll in advance or on the fly (which she demonstrated last night) for free (up to 30 responses). Upgrading to a premium service yields more options. But the free version is pretty great and, as a group, we were able to respond to Sandra's poll she created before our very eyes. We all shared a chuckle when Sandra told us how much quicker her students were at responding, however (grin).

One of our virtual attendees (who engaged our discussion through Elluminate/CCC Confer), Zack from Folsom Lake College, noted that his campus has integrated PollEverywhere across the campus on electronic screens, enabling a constant pulse check on students' thoughts, opinions, and perspectives. Cooool!

Posterous Group Blog Experiment
In an effort to capture more ideas and continue to flow of discussion from the evening, I took my own risk with a social media tool experiment. I created a group blog with posterous.com. I am impressed and will use it again! Posterous has a reputation for making blog posting as simple as possible, and it didn't let me down. A user who wishes to post to a posterous blog (users can be restricted to a single author, a selected group or totally public), simply sends an email to a pre-subscribed posterous email address. That's it. Oh -- and media is embedded automatically. For example, I attached a PDF of a brief presentation and posterous engaged the use of Scribd to embed the pdf directly into my post. If you include a YouTube video url (not embed code) in the post, posterous also converts the url into an embedded video.

Check out our group blog here: http://mobilethinktank.posterous.com You'll find some great ideas and resources shared by Catherine Hillman, another virtual participant, about how she teaches her students how to leverage social media to manage their lives.

When using Posterous for a group, it becomes like a virtual bulletin board for posting ideas, examples, or evidence that meets the group's overarching topic or goal. If I were teaching art history now, I'd put my ancient art history students into groups and have them take photographs of buildings (think houses, strip malls, everything!) in their community that reflect influence of ancient architectural elements -- barrel vault, arch, pediment, etc. I did this as an individual project years ago and it was always a hit -- but making it mobile would be really incredible.

Live from the Archive!
Well, that about sums up the fantastic evening. Again, I was truly inspired by the energy and dynamism of the presentation and the conversation that followed -- I hope it continues! If you're as excited as I am, don't miss the archive of the Elluminate/CCC Confer session (which is closed captioned). Click here to launch the archive.

Does Global Learning Really Occur in College?

2010-12-08T11:57:00.000-08:00

What do you think?
In my December GETinsight blog post, I share my reflections from participating in the groundbreaking Global Education Conference and examine whether or not colleges and universities are embracing the full potential of global learning today.

In your opinion, are web technologies being effectively leveraged today to enhance college students' learning, as well as their overall appreciation and understanding of their place in the world? What are models or strategies to improve global learning in higher ed? And, further, how can the Global Education Conference serve as a model for faculty and leadership development?

Check it out & let's chat!
I invite you to read the post and register to join me in a discussion on this topic next Wednesday, December 15th at 12:00pm Pacific.

Posterous: Easy Group Blogging

2010-12-02T16:44:00.000-08:00

I realize posterous.com isn't exactly new but I'm new to it and just had to share my experiences. Posterous.com is a blog site that allows you to create one (or more) blogs that are owned exclusively by you or that you may designate as a "group blog." You identify who can contribute to your blog and those individuals can add a post to the blog simply by sending an email to your blog's unique email address. Within minutes, the email is translated into a new blog post.

Better yet, attach an image and posterous embeds the image right into the post (same for videos). Urls are turned into hyper links, except for YouTube urls which are actually converted into embedded videos. It's really quite genius. And for a teacher who's looking for a fast and easy solution to creating a group blog for a class (or several group blogs for student groups), it's a great solution.

I've created a group blog for the Mobile Learning Think Tank workshop at Pasadena City College next Thursday, December 9th. It will be our "sandbox" for a back channel and sharing new ideas that sprout out of the workshop presentations. I'm excited! We selected the presentations today and they're great. I'll share details soon.

Want to attend Mobile Learning Think Tank in Pasadena or virtually? Click here to register. It's free!

Teaching Without Walls: College Learning Mash-Up

2010-11-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow at the DET/CHE 2010 Conference in San Diego, I'll be presenting Teaching Without Walls, an overview of a teaching experiment I conducted at Sierra College in the Spring of 2009. The slides for the presentation are embedded below and may also be accessed (and shared) through SlideShare.

Questions and comments are encouraged!

(Can I also share that I'm soooo excited to hear Harold Rheingold speak!?! Big grin.)

Teaching Without Walls: a college teaching experiment leveraging face-to-face, mobile, and web 2.0 learning

View more presentations from Michelle Pacansky-Brock.

Untethering College Learning

2010-11-27T15:03:00.000-08:00

Reflecting on Our Own Ideas
I'm preparing for two events in the next two weeks right now and I always find this "prep" time valuable for me, as it gives me time to reflect and make deeper connections.

This coming week, I'm presenting Teaching Without Walls at the DET/CHE Conference in San Diego. The presentation will be brief at just thirty minutes but will be a lightning fast overview of one of my own teaching experiments at Sierra College in Rocklin, CA. I took a new approach to teaching my traditional lecture-based Women in Art class in an effort to make the time I spent with my students entirely focused on active learning, rather than passive delivery of information. What came out of my experiment was a realization of how effective web-based "delivery" tools (like podcasting, YouTube videos, etc.) are for delivering lectures. And once I was able to shift lecturing online, it opened up the precious face-to-face time I had with students to be spent on fostering higher level learning skills like evaluation, application and synthesis.

The second most valuable learning experience I took away from this experiment was how much students embraced this new model, as it sculpted more opportunities for purposeful, relevant learning in class that was directly tied to learning objectives, making the purpose of all of our activities very clear. I invite you to listen to the 20-minute student interview if you'd like to hear from a few students about their experiences in our class.

On December 9th, I'll be facilitating the Mobile Learning Think Tank at Pasadena City College, an event coordinated by Rachel Fermi and the Digital Media Center at PCC. This workshop has been designed to be a collaborative event. It will be an opportunity for many educators to come together and share their own teaching activities that integrate social media and/or a mobile device in some way. Those who present will be rewarded with a $50 iTunes Gift Card! We've added an option for virtual attendance through the integration of an Elluminate webinar too, in an effort to create a workshop without walls! If you'd like to register, here is the link -- the workshop is free!

The Sharing of Ideas Stimulates Innovation
What I'm taking away from my preparations for these two events is the importance of sharing ideas to foster innovations across the board in higher education. Too often, we still are pressured by the need to be an "expert" before we present and, by no means, do I consider my instructional model I'll be sharing at DET/CHE as the only approach or even a truly refined approach to 21st century learning. But it is an approach and I do hope it encourages audience members to think about new ways to integrate web-based technologies and mobile learning experiences in ways that truly transform our students' learning. Sharing doesn't always feel as natural as it should -- and we need to work together to change this.

What is Mobile Learning?
I also see the connections between both workshops more intimately right now than I did a few weeks ago. The term "Mobile Learning" is widely used through ed-tech circles these days but I haven't seen many thorough discussions about what the term means. I've found that many people assume that mobile learning is learning that is enhanced through the use of a mobile phone/smart phone/iPad/iTouch. But I don't think that's necessarily true. I think what we need to focus on is the broader effect that using a mobile device or web-based tool (from a desktop or laptop) has on learning. And that is, ultimately, untethering learning from occurring during the face-to-face time we spend with our students. Learning that can occur from anywhere at any time is mobile learning.

"Untethered learning" is a phrase I first heard used by Julie Evans of Project Tomorrow. Untethered learning experiences are in demand by our K12 students ... and I think college leaders and educators need to be listening and learning from these voices and brainstorming about how to best meet their interests.

Latest Sloan-C Report on Online Enrollment

2010-11-18T11:15:00.000-08:00

Each year, Sloan-C releases a report about the state of online learning in US higher ed. Last year's report revealed that enrollments from '07-08 increased 17% and there were many that predicted a plateau for the upcoming year. The data in this year's report, Class Differences, foiled that prediction!

The Shift to Online Learning Continues

US higher ed online enrollments from fall '08-09 increased 21% from the previous year and comprise roughly 30% of all higher ed enrollments. While the rate of increase year over year continues to reshape enrollments it's important to keep this growth in perspective with what's happening with overall higher ed enrollments -- they remained relatively stagnant at 1.2%, even less than the previous year's total growth which was 2.5%. This means, each year more and more college students continue to take more online classes and less face-to-face classes. In 2009, one in three college students was enrolled in at least one online class.

Institutional Planning for the Blended College Experience - what's happening on your campus?

The continued unbundling of our traditional vision of college as a brick and mortar, face-to-face experience to a blended or fully online learning journey will continue to challenge traditional approaches to institutional planning. If you work at a college or university, I'm curious to know if you hear your college leaders speak/write about online learning in their strategic presentations about the future of your institution. If they speak or write about a need to plan for "growth," are they envisioning much of this growth to be online and encouraging a bolstering of technological infrastructure in line with increased faculty support for online pedagogy, technological support/training, and accessibility/media specialists; as well as online student services -- rather than "more buildings?" How is this shift challenging traditional approaches to staffing (for example, does your college hire non-local online instructors? Do you assess them in some way to ensure they're skilled in online teaching prior to hiring them? Finally, Is online learning included in your institution's mission statement in someway? If so, how?

Edublog Awards: Nominate Your Favorites Now!

2010-11-17T15:53:00.000-08:00

The nomination process has begun for the 2010 Edublogs Awards! Nominations close Friday, December 3rd.

Last year I was honored (and thrilled!) to receive a 2009 Edublog Award for Best e-Learning blog. If you have found value in the content I've shared on my blog in the past year, I hope you'll consider nominating your favorite post or my blog for one of this year's categories.

Here are my nominations:

Best individual blog
http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/

As a blogger, I am always impressed with those who can maintain consistent, relevant and motivational posts. That's what I find here.

Best individual tweeter
Jason Rhode

I learn a lot from him. He shares invaluable links and has also modeled for me how to integrate Twitter into his teaching (probably without him even realizing that!).

Best resource sharing blog
Jane Hart's Jane's Pick of the Day

Why? Take a peek and you'll know. Packed with great emerging tools for educators.

Best educational use of video / visual
Khan Academy

As an art historian, I feel this twinge of irony inside me as I nominate instructional MATH videos for this category. :-) But the content shared through the Khan Academy, I think, inspires both new approaches to teaching but also communicates the value and importance of sharing content openly.

Best educational webinar series
Steve Hargadon's The Future of Education

I've learned more from this webinar series than any other source I can recall. The interviews that Steve holds are engaging and thought-provoking and since they are all archived, users can choose to participate live or listen later. Honestly, I listen to the archives when I'm at the gym and I love making my exercise time even more productive!

Best educational use of a social networking
Jim Burke's English Companion Ning

I discovered this resource last April while planning the MoblEd10 Conference at Pasadena City College. I think it's a beautiful example of how a social network can fill a void for professional development -- new and experienced english teachers coming together to share, discuss and learn from one another.

Lifetime achievement
Steve Hargadon

I've never met another person so dedicated to collaborating and sharing. Steve models the epitome of a 21st century leader in his selfless and passionate efforts to bring educators together, reflect and change the future course of learning. He is a true inspiration to me.

Click here to learn how to make your nominations.

Smartphones + College = Smart Learning Innovations?

2010-11-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

As online learning continues to resculpt the enrollment and learning landscape in higher education, trends are suggesting that more change is upon us. Today, most online classes include learning activities that are designed to be accessed through a desktop computer. And while many students already possess a smartphone, they're rarely used in college classes as learning tools. Web-based assignments are typically woven into college learning as peripheral activities, completed outside of the classroom. Today, there are certainly noteworthy exceptions, like the thought provoking study demonstrating a connection between student use of Twitter, overall engagement and higher grades.

Today I read an article noting a presentation by Mary Meeker that revealed within two years, smartphone shipments will exceed that of desktop and tablet PC sales combined. First, this rate of saturation is fascinating to me. But, second, increased student ownership of smartphones offers tremendous potential for increasing access to learning, increasing student-generated content (through free or low cost apps) and making learning more anchored in real life experiences or activities. This is our time to plan and innovate -- right?

The questions I'm left with are -- how will this growth in smartphone sales (and the relative tanking of PC sales) alter pedagogy in and out of the physical college classroom? In the classroom, will professors begin to view phones less as a distraction and more as a worthy tool for fostering information gathering and student engagement? Or will resistance to this idea continue, resulting in an increased gap in the way our students are learning inside and outside of their formalized learning environments? Will this gap result in more of a demand for online classes?

Second, how will this shift in internet access away from desktops toward mobile, anytime/anywhere access affect the learning activities in online classes? Will mobility foster more global and/or contextual learning in higher ed and reduce the instructional reliance on "the text"? What apps are most likely to be adapted by colleges and universities -- or are these yet to be developed? Will the increase in smart phones sales impact the reliance on large-scale learning management systems across higher ed?

What ideas do you have for using smartphones to promote student-centered learning in and out of the classroom? What are the biggest obstacles to mobile learning in higher ed?

The Free 2010 Global Education Conference is This Week!

2010-11-14T09:34:00.000-08:00

Steve Hargadon, creator of Classroom 2.0 and collaborative extraordinaire, is one of the chairs of this week's 2010 Global Education Conference. What's so unique about this event? Everything!

The conference is entirely virtual, embracing the full potential of synchronous (Elluminate) and asynchronous (Twitter) web technologies to bring educators together from around the globe to share, discuss and learn together. The event is completely free, runs from Monday, November 15-19, and will include 397 sessions from 62 countries around the world -- WOW!

To view all the related events, go to: http://www.GlobalEducationConference.com.

Here are more details from Steve -- please help spread the word!

The conference is a collaborative and world-wide community effort to significantly increase opportunities for globally-connecting education activities. Our goal is to help you make connections with other educators and students, and for this reason the conference is very inclusive and also provides broad opportunities for participating and presenting. While we have an amazing list of expert presenters and keynote speakers, we will also have some number of presenters who either have not presented before or have not presented in Elluminate--please come to encourage and support them, as they are likely to be a little nervous!

There is no formal registration required for the conference, as all the sessions will be open and public, broadcast live using the Elluminate platform, and available in recorded formats afterwards. There is a limit of 500 live attendees for any given session. To verify that your computer system is configured correctly to access Elluminate, please run the self-test at http://www.elluminate.com/support.

Please tell your friends and colleagues about this event, and watch for the Twitter hashtag #globaled10. See you online!

Building Your Classroom without Walls

2010-11-12T10:33:00.000-08:00

My November GETinsight blog post is now live and I'd like to invite you to participate in our office hour discussion next week on Wednesday, November 17th at 12:00noon.

This month we'll be discussing the post "Building Your Classroom without Walls," which delves into an inquiry about whether "lecturing to" students during class time fosters relevant skills for today's information society. In this post, I offer an alternative instructional model, used in my own teaching, that shifts passive learning online, freeing up classroom time for active, more personalized learning experiences. I hope you'll find this topic relevant to your campus discussions about blended learning and new pedagogical approaches and encourage you to share your own practical strategies, as well, so we can learn from one another.

To register for the office hour event, please click on the link at the top of the blog post:
http://www.getideas.org/getinsight-blog/building-your-classroom-without-walls

I am looking forward to an engaging discussion next week!

Sharing Our Way to Learning Innovations

2010-10-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

I've been reflecting a lot this week on the concept of "sharing" and how it relates to learning. I read David Wiley's fabulous "Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation" in which he eloquently points out the learning doesn't occur without sharing -- never has, never will. Despite the need for educators to share their knowledge to facilitate learning, academia fosters a contradictory possessiveness within an professor -- "That's your intellectual property, don't let anyone else have it!"

While that may sound like a gross overstatement, I don't think it is. I have shared many "ouch" moments after giving a passionate presentation about podcasting in education to faculty. After demonstrating how simple it is share one's content with the world, I am met with a perplexed, wrinkled forehead and the words, "But that's my intellectual property. I need to protect it." I usually respond with, "Your ideas could change the world but they're meaningless if you don't spread them." I've had a few success stories but, mostly, professors retreat back to their offices and continue to share content behind a password protected walls of Blackboard.

Wiley's article noted a recent incident in which a professor proceeded to press charges against a student for attempting to sell his lecture notes on the grounds that the student was redistributing his IP without consent. Really? In Wiley's words, which I couldn't write better myself,

"What is the impact on learning when teachers knowingly withhold, conceal, and restrict access to knowledge or its representations? Conversely, what is the comparative impact on learning when teachers share, give, and are generous with access to knowledge and its representations? Perhaps most important, what is our primary interest as educators: facilitating student learning or commercializing what we know? If our primary interest is facilitating student learning, then education is our field. If commercializing what we know is our primary interest, then we shouldn't be educators."

Video Sharing Accelerates Learning & Innovation

I also recently viewed Chris Anderson's, of TED, thought provoking presentation about how shared videos are accelerating the pace of learning and unveiling intense innovations at lightning speed. He used a practical example of a young boy who had mastered expert dance moves at an incredibly young age, all through watching videos online. He himself is now a YouTube phenomenon. While that may not feel like a world stopping example, I pause and think it's pretty terrific. Video communicates much more information than text or audio and, of course, as it continues to become easier to make, share, and watch (now on mobile devices too), it's going to alter our learning patterns.

Here's a story from my own family that relates. Last week my 8-year old son came to me and said, "Mommy, I want to make a wooden top." Remember those? The kind that spin after you pull a string. Apparently he saw on in a movie. I returned his idea with a glance conveying a blend of support and self-doubt, knowing I had no clue how to help him produce his great idea but still hoping to encourage him to pursue it. He proceed to the garage to search for wood!

So I called my dad who has experience with wood carving and asked if he could help. He was silent for a moment and then said, "Let me think about this. Bring him over tomorrow." My dad is 71-year-old retired research chemist and a passionate life long learner. He reads endlessly but also listens to podcasts and watches online videos -- usually that pertain to quantum theory. When I brought my son over the next day, my dad brought my son, over to his computer and had him sit in the chair. An 11-minute YouTube video began to play on the screen, demonstrating "How to make a wooden top" -- using only the tools my dad had in his garage. By the next afternoon, the top was finished -- and it's impressive! My son has brought it to school and shared it with everyone in the neighborhood. His creative idea came to fruition -- thanks to my wise Pop and YouTube.

The Path Ahead

My son's story is a small but powerful example of how shared content has transformed learning, as well as the role of formalized education in the 21st century. School is no longer needed to get information. Think about that -- schools were developed to share information with the masses. Now that "The World is Open," as Curtis Bonk wrote, what is the purpose of a formalized education? Has the internet replaced the need for teachers and professors? Absolutely not, but the role we play has changed. As ATG wrote, "Teaching is Not About Knowing (Anymore)."

In an open world information abounds -- which is amazingly empowering but also terribly frightening when we realize that our children today and many adults don't know how to navigate, filter, and think critically about that information. And, in turn, the media swiftly continues to corrode the minds of Americans -- feeding us a bottomless pit of gender, racial and ethnic stereotypes that inform how we think about ourselves and value those around us. I believe educators have the most influence on the direction of learning in the future.

Participating in the sharing of our ideas can truly change not only more lives but the world. We need the great professors to begin to record their thoughts and share them openly. We need colleges and universities to integrate sharing into the tenure process. Can you imagine how that would shift things? Imagine if professors were encouraged to blog and post videos/audio recordings and textual representations of their arguments and ideas? Still need it in book form? Fine -- http://blog2print.sharedbook.com/blogworld/printmyblog/index.html We need tenure to truly embrace the value of innovation in teaching and learning ... and sharing is innovation.

When water is prevented from flowing naturally, it accumulates in large amounts until its power becomes so immense that it overflows its boundaries and devastates its surroundings. Share and change the world.

Integrating Online Teaching into the Campus Culture

2010-10-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

Has your college/university experienced a significant increase in online classes in recent years? Or is your campus preparing to ramp up its online offerings? The success of a student's online learning experience hinges largely upon how thoughtfully and strategically this new teaching and learning method is integrated into the fabric of your campus culture.

This month, in my GETideas.org blog post, I explore these ideas and more in my post titled "Integrating Online Teaching into the Campus Culture."

I will be holding a free online "office hour" to discuss your related thoughts and ideas. If you have a success story to share, please join us! If you'd just like to listen in, pull up a seat too! Everyone is welcome.

October Office Hour with Michelle:

Tuesday, October 19th at 12pm PST (3PM Eastern)

A registration link will be available shortly at the top of the blog post.

Join Me! Increasing Student Success with Google Sites - free webinar

2010-10-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

Hey Professors,

Would you like to increase the number of prepared students on your roster? Do you dream about a class students who, on day one, are informed and know what to expect from your class?

Did you know there are more than 10,000,000 student comments shared on RateMyProfessors.com, a site your students use to learn about you and your class? Wouldn't you prefer to harness the potential of this web 2.0 wave to introduce yourself to your students and get them prepared for your class?

You will learn how to use an existing Professor Website Template on Google Sites to start building your site today!

Join me this Wed, 10/13 at 12:00 PST for the @One Desktop Seminar: Increasing Student Success with Google Sites.

Register here -- yes, it's free!

A Historic Day for Community Colleges

2010-10-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

Today was a historic day. The first ever White House Community College was held in Washington, DC. The veil that has been cast over the vital role community colleges has been lifted.

Read the transcript of the entire speech here.

My Community College Roots
I am proud to have seven years of experience as a full-time faculty member at a community college. My former students still serve as inspirations to me. I work at home now and keep letters, cards and artwork from former students nearby. They were given to me as "thank you" gifts -- for being an inspiration in their lives. Today, those objects of gratitude motivate me every day. I miss my students. And days like today make me miss teaching at a community college tremendously.

I've shared this story before on my blog but think it deserves to be shared again. My father, now a retired research chemist, came from an impoverished immigrant family in New Jersey. He was the only child, out of fifteen siblings (yes, I said fifteen), to go to college. In the 1960s he began his college experience after hearing a story about magical institutions of higher education in California that admit anybody ... for free. He left New Jersey on his own, drove across the country and enrolled at Porterville Community College. After completing his associates degree, he transferred to San Jose State where he completed his BS and MS and then went on to complete his PhD in Chemistry from Iowa State University.

After college, my dad had a very successful career as a research scientist at IBM's Almaden Research Lab. His story plays a role in fueling my passion for learning. He is seventy one now (and still learning, by the way). If you were to ask him today to reflect on his college "successes," he would credit community colleges with granting him the opportunity to explore his dream -- to learn. But that rarely gets highlighted, as one continues with his/her life crediting their terminal degree granting institution, not the one that got them on the road to success.

A New Society Calls for a New Learning Paradigm
What's dramatically different today is the fact that the internet extends opportunities to learn to anyone with web access. We need to be rethinking the relevance of the college learning experience in the context of our digital, information society while we're strengthening our community colleges. I believe that is key to this dialogue and I sincerely hope it played a major role at the summit today. I believe the learning environments faculty, administrators, and staff create and support for community college students play a significant role in ensuring student success. Dyslexic students, students with other forms of learning disabilities, english as a second language students, international students -- these are just some of the demographics of a community college classroom.

Faculty, administrators and staff need to be supporting their learning by crafting inclusive learning environments which can be supported through the use of podcasting for "presenting information" and saving precious class time for applying the information, fostering higher order thinking skills, engaging in debates, sharing unique perspectives, working in teams and presenting projects. Lecture is an exclusive learning environment. Some students can succeed just fine through listening and taking notes but most cannot. The human brain cannot listen and take notes at the same time -- even without a learning challenge. When you're taking notes, your brain is processing the note-taking and is not listening to the lecture, creating gaps that the brain then needs to simultaneously fill in order to follow a presentation.

Moreover, students don't feel confident enough to raise a hand and ask for clarification once, twice, three times in a lecture setting. Podcasting provides opportunities to for students to receive the lecture content before of the classroom, stop/pause as necessary, and even learn mobility (on the bus, in the gym, etc.). Moreover, podcasts (audio alone or video) can be accompanied by a text-based transcript. When I shared lecture podcasts with transcripts with my students, only 15% of them chose to "only listen" to the podcast. In a classroom, listening is your only option! 30% of my students chose to listen and read at the same time. I believe this is significant and changes the way we frame "learning" in a college classroom.

Once the content is delivered, classroom time is spent on applying it through a variety of engaging activities and addressing questions along the way. The lecture still plays a role but this model enables the freeing of classroom time to make learning relevant and community-based. Students understand that they need to come to class so they can learn -- rather than passively receive information. The YouTube generation has high expectations for face-to-face time. They'll tune out or -- worse -- never come back. If the classroom experience can be replicated online then it should be. It makes sense. Spend face-to-face time on activities that cannot be replicated online.

I realize this shift rocks the traditional foundation of higher ed, considering lectures have been the method of college learning since the Middle Ages. A new society that requires new skills calls for a new learning model.

New Opportunities for Community College Innovation
The day of dialogue included the announcement of several new innovative programs, offered to bolster student success and increase the completion rates for community college students. Here they are (the following is excerpted from "Building American Skills by Strengthening Community Colleges," publicly shared on the White Houses Community College website).

Get ready -- grant funds will be allotted through a competitive application process. The time to innovate is now!

Gates Foundation: Completion by Design

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will announce Completion by Design, which aims to dramatically improve community college graduation rates by building on proven, existing practices to implement model pathways making the college experience more responsive to today’s student’s needs and education goals. The competitive grant program is a $35 million investment over five years to 3-5 multi-campus groups of community colleges in nine states serving the largest populations of low-income students (Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington). Completion by Design supports tough-minded campus- or college-based analysis to learn where along the education journey students are being lost and to design an intentional educational pathway that employs proven and promising practices at every critical moment from enrollment to credential completion.

Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence
The Aspen Institute, the Joyce and Lumina Foundations, and the charitable foundations of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have partnered to announce a new, $1 million annual prize to recognize, reward, and inspire outstanding outcomes in community colleges nationwide. The Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence will shine a spotlight on outstanding performers and rising stars that deliver exceptional results in student completion rates and workforce success; distill and share successful practices; and contribute to the development of high-quality, consistent measures and benchmarks for assessing community college outcomes. By focusing the field on a clear and bold definition of success, honoring excellence with prizes and prestige, and accelerating the spread of successful practices, the prize aims to galvanize the work of reform-minded educators, governors, employers, and community college presidents across the nation. The Aspen Prize will launch in the spring of 2011 and celebrate the first winners that fall.

Skills for America’s Future
On October 4, President Obama announced the launch of Skills for America’s Future, a new initiative to expand innovative strategies and improve the skills of America’s workers. Skills for America’s Future will build high-impact partnerships with industry, labor unions, community colleges and other training providers in all 50 states, all in support of the President’s goal of 5 million more community college graduates and certificates by 2020.
Skills for America’s Future is in response to a key recommendation by the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which spent the last year surveying employers about their workforce needs and development strategies.

Skills for America’s Future will be spearheaded by Penny Pritzker, Chairman and Founder, Pritzker Realty Group, and Walter Isaacson, CEO, Aspen Institute. Together, they will advance this effort by recruiting additional private sector leaders; providing a national voice for effective public/private partnerships in workforce development; developing a “certification” for best-in- class partnerships; and leveraging new opportunities for online learning, measuring program impact and sharing lessons learned. Several Fortune 500 companies, including PG&E, Gap Inc., McDonald’s, United Technologies, and Accenture, have already committed to support the Skills for America’s Future initiative and will work over the next year to expand their training partnerships to provide American workers the skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

Community College Innovation Ideas Abound

2010-09-30T17:29:00.000-07:00

If you haven't yet, be sure to check out the ideas that have been contributed from people around the country for innovations at community colleges. The ideas are being submitted to contribute to the first White House Community College Summit on October 5th which will be streamed live.

Check it out and participate here.

Join Me! GETinsight Office Hours Tomorrow, 9/21

2010-09-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

Are you looking for a way to increase your online retention rates? Join the conversation...

Please join me tomorrow, September 21st at 9:00am PST for a live online Office Hours discussion about my September GETinsight blog post, Learning in the Social Web: Increasing Retention Rates with the Human Touch.

Read the blog post and register here!

MacArthur YOUmedia Model: The Future of Visual Arts & Community Colleges?

2010-09-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

Learning through Creating Content with Digital Media

The MacArthur Foundation continues to lead impressive efforts that explore how digital media is changing the way young people learn, as well as establish provocative examples of next generation learning institutions. Now, in response to President Obama's "Educate to Innovate," they're teaming up with the Institute of Museum and Library Science (IMLS) to create 30 new youth learning labs across the nation, leveraging a $4 million grant. The lab locations will be identified after a competitive application process is initiated in 2011. The model is inspired by a hot new learning space at Chicago Public Library called YOUmedi a which transforms young people into content creators, using digital media tools as their palette. Digital photography, video, and music become critical thinking vehicles and opportunities for expression and exploration of personal interests and passions. In the process, 21st century skills are fostered.

Robert Gallucci, President of the MacArthur Foundation, says,
"With digital media, learning takes place anywhere, anytime. So we must break free of the old-fashioned notion that schools are the only places for learning and provide young people with engaging and diverse opportunities beyond the classroom. "YOUmedia is an excellent example of 21st Century learning. Bringing the model to other cities will mark an important step in motivating young people to learn and preparing them for a globally competitive workforce.”
Bravo, MacArthur Foundation! Your innovative ideas continue to bring light to the legitimacy and criticality of engaging our students in learning through digital media, as well as reshaping our vision of what a "learning institution" is.

A Model for Community Colleges?

What I'm left with are thoughts and wonderment about how this model could be woven into community colleges, as a method of engaging non-traditional, high risk students in the learning process, as well as situating visual arts departments within a relevant 21st century discourse.

As a former community college art history professor, I have always imagined ways to bring 'the history of art' out of the dusty, marginalized corners of art departments and situate it as the 'history of images,' providing students with essential visual literacy skills for 21st century success. Our students, taking on the role of content creators, need to understand how to read, analyze, and recontextualize visual information to convey their ideas. "The history of art" is one discipline that plays directly into this sharpening these skills. The MacArthur model, to me, implicitly positions the visual arts, typically at high risk for cuts in traditional institutions, as a top priority in the circles of cutting edge learning innovations. The YOUmedia lab concept also taps directly into a dynamic learning model for the diverse student audience supported by community colleges around our nation.

It will be interesting to see where this goes in 2011.

10 Uses of Wordle for Learning

2010-09-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

It's always fun to revisit a favorite tool. One of mine is Wordle. This week I used it to create a fun, creative, and inexpensive invitation for my son's birthday party and here I used it for a little self-reflecting. I just plugged in the url to my blog and Wordle created this lovely word cloud, identifying the words I use most commonly in recent posts. This is my blog's self-portrait (at least for this week!).

created with wordle.net

10 Uses of Wordle for Learning:

Analyze a transcript of politician's speech. What do the word patterns tell you about his/her message and word choice?
Analyze a self-written essay to identify the words you're using the most or over-using. Is this a tool that could be used to diversify word choice?
Create a public Google doc. Type an open-ended question at the top; such as, "Share a word or phrase that demonstrates what 'democracy' means to you." After all students in your class have responded, copy the text of the Google doc and paste it into Wordle. Bam! Instant collaborative word cloud, demonstrating diverse opinions and perspectives.
Have your students/program/school identify their ethnicity and create a Wordle that conveys the diverse demographics of your group. This could be a great graphic for a "People and Cultures Day/Week" event.
On a computer, have each student type a brief paragraph about what they've learned at the end of each week. Each time they add a new paragraph, type it above the previous one in the same document (like a blog -- or better yet, make it a blog!). At a significant marking point (midterm, for example), have each student copy all the text and paste it into Wordle. Break into small groups to analyze similarities and differences in the word hierarchies.
Wordle uses size to convey 'hierarchy' between words. Identify other examples of how size communicates importance in our culture.
Create a Wordle self-portrait and share it on your website or blog at the start of a term to introduce yourself to your new students.
Have students take notes on a chapter, article, or movie. Paste the notes into Wordle and reflect on the most important ideas or key terms each student has taken away from the content.
Create a Wordle to introduce a new learning unit. Use key terms, names of key figures, concepts, etc.
Use it for formative feedback throughout a class. At the end of a learning unit, welcome students to reflect on the success of the unit. Have them share 1) what worked well 2) what didn't work well. Collect the feedback, make a Wordle for each category, and discuss each of them with the class.

Educator's Guide to Making it Visual - here it is!

2010-09-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

Today I am sharing my brand new Educator's Guide to Making it Visual with Web 2.0.

What do images have to do with learning? A lot! Studies in neuroscience have demonstrated that when information is presented orally, people remember about 10 percent when tested 72 hours later. If an image is added into the oral presentation, the retention rate increases to 65 percent. (Medina, Brain Rules, 2008) Prehistoric cave paintings provide evidence of the human brain's innate desire for visual information. Yet, most formal learning environments are comprised purely of textual or auditory content.

In contrast, today's web 2.0 landscape has altered our informal learning environment. Now visual content -- cool, slick, inviting graphics that are sometimes interactive -- is everywhere. Images provide opportunities for deeper learning, increased retention, creative critical thinking activities, and promote a warmer, more engaging environment. Get creative and open up your mind to the possibilities of teaching with images!

Like what you see?

Then join me for a free 60-minute @One Desktop Seminar next Wed, 9/22 at 12noon PST for a more thorough demonstration of the tools shared in this new guide. Register here!

You may also enjoy my Guide to a 21st Century Syllabus which explores the potential of visual content to transform that oh, so important document professors upon so heavily.

Check out the Shared Resources tab of my blog for more goodies related to innovations in teaching with web-based technologies.

How Have Community Colleges Changed Your Life?

2010-09-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

This is for anyone and everyone whose life has been changed by the opportunity to learn at a community college. PLEASE SHARE the following with your networks.

California's Reality
Did you know that California community colleges enroll nearly 40% of the nation's 8 million community college students? Did you know this year more than two million California community college students have been turned away due to catastrophic budget cuts? Counselors, tutors, faculty and other important staff members have been laid off. Entire programs have been eliminated. 58% of funding for California community colleges comes from the state. In a time when our enrollments are soaring and access to higher education is encouraged intensely at the national level, CCCs are receiving less and less and still expected to do more. Let's be sure our voices are included in this national dialogue -- a rare opportunity!

How Your Story Can Help
The first ever White House Summit on Community Colleges is scheduled for 10/5. This article explains the significance of the event (link also shared below). As you know, it's rare for CCs to get this type of national exposure. To set the stage, there is currently an open call to current or past community college students to share how CCs have changed their lives:

"As part of the summit dialogue, Americans across the country are encouraged to submit their thoughts and questions for discussion. The White House has set up a number of ways for the public to participate in the summit, which can be found online at http://www.WhiteHouse.gov/CommunityCollege. The White House especially wants to hear how students' lives have been transformed after attending a community college."

Link to full article:
http://chronicle.com/article/Community-Colleges-to-Take/124421/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Increasing Online Retention with the Human Touch

2010-09-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

September Post for GETInsight Blog

My September GETInsight blog post is now live. This month I explore the potential of social technologies to increase retention rates in online classes. Retention rates in online classes are generally lower than their face-to-face counterparts and this is a hot topic as the US continues to see online enrollments soar year over year.

I invite you to read the post here on the GETideas.org network!

If you'd like to continue this conversation, I will be hosting a free, live online "office hours" event on GETIdeas.org on September 21st at 9:00am PST. Stay tuned for registration details.

K12 Virtual Schools Get Serious About Effective Online Teaching

2010-09-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

As K12 districts around the nation continue to ramp up their online class offerings, they are acknowledging that teaching online requires a unique skillset from teaching in the classroom.

Education Week is offering a free webinar on September 23rd at 11am PST that will showcase this conversation and also touch upon strategies for online teacher evaluations and the critical importance of communicating effectively with students in an online setting.

Evaluating E-Educator's Evolving Skills

11am PST

FREE - registration required

For more info:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/marketplace/webinars/webinars.html

Having fun with visual tools!

2010-09-10T17:02:00.000-07:00

I'm having a blast preparing for next week's @One Make it Visual with Web 2.0 desktop seminar. I'm developing a new "Educator's Guide" for the presentation and will be posting it to the Shared Resources page of my blog next week.

Blabberize is one of the free, easy to use tools I'll be sharing. Imagine what you can do in your classes with it:

Have a historical figure present a discussion prompt
Have a historical figure recite a provocative quote
Have an endangered animal speak about a loss of its habitat
More ideas? Share them!

Want to try it out? Go to blabberize.com and have fun!

Join Me for Make It Visual with Free Web 2.0 Tools

2010-09-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

Today's web 2.0 landscape has altered the terrain of information. Now visual content -- cool, slick, inviting graphics that are sometimes even interactive -- abound. Some educators have already begun experimenting with the easy-to-use visual tools and others aren't even aware of them yet nor realize how easy they are to use! Here's your chance to jump in!

In this free @One Desktop Seminar, I will demonstrate a few web-based, visual tools that you can use to create promotional flyers, stunning banners for your online class or introduce new class topics in a fun, dynamic way.

Join me for a FREE 60-minute online @One Desktop Seminar:

Make it Visual with Free Web 2.0 Tools

Wed, 9/22
12noon PST

Click here to register.

Social Media Encourages Revisiting Your Own Work

2010-08-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

For seven year, I taught art appreciation at a community college. As I gained more and more teaching experience, I began to identify certain concepts that could be taught more effectively. Each year, I would experiment with new ways of teaching one or two of these concepts and frequently these experiments involved digital technologies.

One of those concepts was the theory of simultaneous contrast, an important step in understanding how colors affect other colors and a thread in a student's mastery of visual analysis skills. I had been taught this theory by a professor who literally held up two pieces of colored cardboard side by side, alternating one and leaving the other piece the same. I remember him saying, "Do you see it? Do you see it?" And I left the class thinking, "Nope." There are always attempts in books to show this theory with two squares, placed side by side with a smaller square in the center of each. The center square is the exact same color and the surrounding color varies in each. Like this example:

One day I created a Keynote presentation with a series of 'big squares' that surrounded 'smaller square' like this one above. I flipped through about ten slides that were each connected with a cross-fade transition. My students were enthralled and I thought, "Yes! I've got it!"

Then, on a whim, I decided to export it to a .mov file and upload it to YouTube. I honestly completely forgot about this video until today when I received an email notifying me that someone had commented on it. This email notification served, for me, as a realization of how social media, like YouTube, can often encourage us to revisit our own work which is an important step in reflecting on our own learning growth as individuals and educators. I share the video here in hopes that other may find it useful in their own teaching or learning.

Click play and keep your eyes on the center square. The color of the center square does not change -- it only appears to change because of the affect of the shifts in the color of its viewing context.

Thoughts on My First Office Hours Event

2010-08-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

Today I held my first live, online 'office hours,' hosted by Catherine Shinners, the community manager of GETideas.org. I've been invited by GETideas to write a monthly blog post related to practical strategies for educational innovations through technology, particular pertaining to higher education.

As I noted in an earlier post here, this month's blog topic was "Why Social Networking Matters to College Leaders." The office hours event was attended by about 15 people, which I thought was great considering this is "back to school" week for many colleges and universities across the nation. Here's a recap of some of the highlights from our conversation.

Corey Gin, from CSU East Bay, shared how his university is actively engaging Twitter to communicate important campus announcements and events to students and we reflected on how the university's recent adoption of Google apps is encouraging a recognition of the validity and relevance of web 2.0 tools across their campus culture.

We also talked about the important and timely topic of negotiating the fine line of privacy in our social networks. One can argue that privacy doesn't exist in a social network but doesn't this conversation change when professors are befriended by students or former students? How do we, as educators, respond to these friend requests on Facebook? How do we each move forward with establishing our own 'rules' in this area? What are others doing in these situations?

Amy Moore, of Florida State College at Jacksonville, shared that her institution is collaboratively developing a set of guidelines to assist faculty with negotiating their presence on social networking sites. And Kerry Mix of San Jacinto College indicated that a 'social media users committee' has been established at his college and the group is also working towards writing policy around topic, as well.

Bethany Bovard, of the Sloan Consortium and New Mexico State University shared a great tip! She and many of her NMSU colleagues have integrated Yammer into their campus dialogue. Yammer (a site that is new to me -- thanks, Bethany!) is "like Twitter" but creates "private social networks for your company." Those who converse in a Yammer network are conversing only with their professional co-workers. And it's free (grin). I'd love to hear more about this from Bethany and I already a slew of ideas I want to try out with Yammer.

Jeanne Guerin, of Sierra College, who is a former colleague of mine shared the innovative concept her college has developed in recent years which leverages Elluminate (rebranded "CCC Confer" at California Community Colleges) to create live online sessions between students and the writing center staff (called SCOWC, the Sierra College Online Writing Center). The sessions foster live interaction with online students to foster improvements in the students' writing. I love this story, as it showcases a very innovative use of a web conferencing system to directly support students who are not on campus but, beyond that, the project would not have been possible without a grant from the CCC Chancellor's office that makes the use of CCC Confer free to all California community college employees (and students). Despite the success of the project, however, it remains on thin ice due to the budgetary constraints of her underfunded college.

Together we posed the question -- don't budget allocations always come down to local priorities? Are innovations valued as priorities in higher education? Certainly the answer to that will vary but it's such an important question to keep at the surface as we take our steps into the second decade of the 21st century and continue to see our world transform.

Thanks to those who attended and participated in our conversation. If you missed the event and would like to listen in anyway, stay tune -- I will share the link to the archive when it becomes available.

My next GETInsight blog post will go live on September 13th. The topic is "Online Learning in the Social Web" (very near and dear to my heart). I hope you will consider joining us on Tuesday, September 21st at 9am for the office hours event for this topic. We'd love to have you be part of the conversation! Bring your ideas and questions to share!

Cheers!

First Day of School

2010-08-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

My boys started school this week. On the first day, I spent a few moments in my son's third grade classroom with him, hoping to engage him in a conversation about his new "learning space." My son was born in 2002. He loves selecting his favorite songs on iTunes and listening to them on his shiny green (his favorite color) iPod Nano. His Nano fits in the tiniest of pockets. It includes his favorite songs, a few movies I've added for him, video games and a video camera that he uses to capture silly moments or his latest bicycle trick.

As we stood there in his classroom, I looked around at the perfectly aligned desks and colorful posters on the wall. I asked him, "What's your favorite part about your new classroom?" He paused and thought for a moment. Then he proceeded to walk to the front of the room and place both of his arms around the big, gray, rickety overhead projector -- "This. This, Mommy, is my favorite thing."

It was not a cool, new doc camera. It is a basic, old overhead projector -- complete with a transparency lying on its surface and dry erase markers nearby. My son knows that I too had overhead projectors in MY classrooms when I was his age. He didn't have to say one more word to me to convey his message.

Teacher, professor, grad student, principal, instructional designer, dean, president, instructional assistant, librarian, chancellor -- it doesn't matter what your title is. We are all educators. Our end goal is to educate. A 21st century education demands 21st century tools to engage 21st century learners.

Why Social Networking Matters to College Leaders: Let's Talk!

2010-08-18T12:36:00.000-07:00

Join me on Tuesday, August 24 for an free, live online discussion Office Hours event on GETideas.org, an open, online community for education leaders to discuss opportunities for innovation and transformation in education. My live Office Hours is part of the GETinsight program on GETideas.org, a blog and live Office Hours program to discuss practical strategies for education innovation.

Once a month, I will be available for conversation and discussion on my GETinsight blog post, and this month will be talking with you about “Why Social Networking Matters to College Leaders” and can help address college retention and enhance student engagement.

The Office Hours are August 24 at 9 a.m. PST/12:00 p.m. EST and 5:00 p.m. GMT…Register today!