Why does the Web just keep getting cooler?

It's not the massive changes in the Web that keep me hooked. Sure, I've jumped on just about every bandwagon so far, with the exception of MySpace. I attempted Twittering (but I'm too wordy), I friend people on Facebook and I blog about every little detail in my children's lives. These things are great, but it's the little things the Web lets me do that make me giddy. And yes, I was giddy when I saw this hack. What I found was a blog post demonstrating how to send RSS feeds to a PDF directly from Google Reader. This actually has some practical applications. During my job search, when I used The Chronicle of Higher Education RSS feeds to keep updated on job postings, I would star the jobs that looked interesting. My wife would then go into my account, look up the starred items and copy-n-paste the job details to our massive spreadsheet. This wasn't a horrible system, but it would have been much easier if I could have sent the job posting directly to a PDF for Gina to read later. This would have reduced the amount of logging in and clicking.

As a disclaimer, the end result of this RSS-to-PDF conversion is not perfect, as you can see here. The formatting is all jacked up, which makes it a little cumbersome to get to the actual story. But, this is nice for saving content on my hard drive that I think I might want to keep. The aforementioned blog post mentions several other Google Reader hacks that I may try later.

Their tools vs. Google's tools

As I was working on finalizing course materials today, I was faced with a dilemma. Do I use the tools the university provides, or do I use the Google tools (docs, sites, calendar, etc.) I'm already so familiar with? Well, I checked their tools out, and for now I think I will use the tools I already know. It's not that I have anything against the proprietary tools my school provides, and, despite what my students may say, I am not a Google fanboi. I have actually come to like Blackboard quite a bit, especially compared to the course-management software I was using before. My current school offers quite a nice suite of tools and provides training, so I will definitely keep learning them and find ways to use them in my classes. But when deciding what tools to use this semester, I kept coming back to two main criteria: ease of use and portability. The ease of use issue is a no-brainer if you have ever spent any time using Google Docs or Sites. Once you learn the interface, they are easy and FAST!

Then there's the issue of portability. Have you ever uploaded a document to Blackboard, then decided you wanted to make a change? What if you did this, say, 4 times? After you have changed the original, you have to go into Blackboard and delete the old file (and any metadata you may have added to the item) and replace it with the new one (and re-type the metadata ... unless you thought ahead to copy and paste into a Word doc). This gets pretty old. Now, imagine the same scenario with Google Docs. You make the change and save it. Since you have already added the item to Blackboard as an external link, the changes will show up there automatically. No deleting, re-typing and uploading current versions.

My former institution (wahoo wa) made the leap to Google Apps, and the students took to it like crazy. They were already using these tools, so the switch required basically no reconditioning on their part. It made my job a lot easier teaching ed. tech. classes because they didn't have to open a Google Account to access all of the tools we used throughout the semester. So, I look forward to introducing this next batch of preservice teachers to open source and free tools, while learning how to use a whole bunch of new tools myself . This should be pretty fun.

And your homework for tonight is ... Facebook?

I've been thinking a lot about this post from Will Richardson. On one hand, I agree with Will. There is tremendous potential in using social media for learning. I have personally had this experience while trying to learn something new, such as CSS, PHP, digital video, guitar riffs, how to clean my lawnmower's carburettor, etc. In most cases, someone else held the key to a problem I was struggling with, and had I not been connected to a large pool of folks with similar interests and extensive knowledge, I would either be stuck in a rut or would have bailed on the whole thing altogether. The distinct characteristic from these learning experiences and those of K-12 (and undergrad, in most cases) students is that I was personally driven to learn something new. Students are personally driven to learn new things as well, but in many cases their personal interests don't align with the learning objectives established by their teachers. So, in the case of this 20-year old University of Missouri student, he probably is learning a lot by engaging in social media. He has probably learned a slew of new terms from the Urban Dictionary. He has learned how to be witty in 140 characters or less. He has learned how to keep tabs on his high school girlfriend. And I wouldn't be surprised if he has not only learned how to get free music from YouTube, but also discovered music he otherwise would have never heard of. The challenge for educators (and professors) is a) to convince this kid that most of these "skills" (minus the stalking) can cross over to his academics and make learning a much more personally rewarding experience, and b) to venture into this scary territory where they relinquish control over the learning environment without drenching it in a cheap, imitation school-scented cologne.

In response to Will's question, I'm not sure the blame for this kid's lack of vision lies with anyone in particular. Perhaps the blame lies with anyone who believes differently and doesn't do anything about it.

Course Planning

I've recently been busy planning my fall courses while my wife and twins are in Texas visiting family. This is my first time planning education courses where technology is not the central focus. I still plan on using a lot technology in my instruction, and I want the students to have the opportunity to use it as well. The question that keeps haunting me, however, is, "How much technology is too much in a non-technology based course?" I have no idea what they addressed in their technology courses, to what degree they were accountable to master the skills and concepts, or what their attitude is toward learning new innovations. From my own experience teaching ed. tech. classes, even my best students would promptly forget how to do things we did continually in my class (e.g., posting to a blog or creating a link on a webpage).

I have been relatively cautious this time around and have not drenched my class projects with technology. This will probably change as I get to know the students and the available resources. As a point of reference, I recently met a graduate of this teacher ed. program, and she was pretty darn tech. savvy. So, this is encouraging.

When good images go bad

Garr Reynolds does a nice job in this blog post of demonstrating the many mistakes people make when putting images in their presentation slides. The example that resonated most with me was the gratuitious use of stock clip art. I co-taught with someone once who quite literally filled every slide with irrelevant (or relevant but cheesy) clip art. Most of it came from the Microsoft Office Clip Art gallery, I'm sure. I was already pretty sensitive to these kinds of mistakes when creating my own presentations, but I will definitely check more closely from now on.

As a confession, I went through a stage several years ago when I would put cool images from Flickr as the background of my slides. I thought I was being clever, but my students hated it. The images were distracting and made the text hard to read. I stopped doing this eventually, and now when I open up those old presentations I am really embarrassed that I put my students through that for an entire semester.  That semester also resulted in my lowest course evaluations ever.  Could there be a connection between bad PPTs and student disdain for the course? I have more than a few personal examples (and I'm not the bad example in most of them) to verify this claim.

Crutches

I'll never forget my first class session ever of "Teaching with Technology." It was my first semester in the doc program at UVA, and this was the first day of the class I was teaching. After going over the syllabus and other course materials, I tried to get the class to discuss their beliefs about using technology in the classroom. Most of the students made general statements about how they thought it was important because technology is such a part of our society. Everything was going pretty well until one student piped in and said, "I think technology is great as long as students don't use it as a crutch." I had no idea the can of worms that statement would open up. The rest of the semester seemed to be a battle between me and crutch-dom. PowerPoint was perceived as a crutch. Inspiration was a crutch. Digital storytelling was a crutch. The Internet? You guessed it. I guess if one were to follow this line of reasoning completely, everything could be interpreted as a crutch. I mean, Socrates thought printed text was a crutch because it eliminated the need to set everything to memory.

I'm being a little sarcastic, but was my student totally wrong? She had a legitimate concern that students would forgo learning certain skills or knowledge because of their dependency on technology. The first thing that comes to mind is spellchecking. I have graded countless papers with substitutions of "there," "'their" and "they're." I make that mistake myself because I don't take the time to proofread properly.

I recently had another experience where technology was a crutch when my family and I moved to a new city. In the past, I would keep a map of the city in my car and learn the roads as I drove around. Initially, I would make a lot of U-turns, but eventually I would learn the city inside out. Well, this time we had a GPS, and we used it for everything. The upside of using a GPS is that I never got lost (almost never) and I was pretty much on time to everything. I experienced much less frustration learning a new city than in the past. This week, my wife went to visit her parents for a couple of weeks and took the GPS with her. I didn't think this was a big deal until I tried to get from the downtown to my office yesterday. I was utterly lost, and nothing around me looked familiar until I arrived on campus. Why is this? Because I had been staring at the GPS for two weeks instead of looking around me.

Is it possible our students do this? They can get so focused on the tools they are using that they lose sight of the big picture. This is why the role of the teacher is so important. Teachers can structure activities in ways that make the learning objectives the focus, not the technology. They can also scaffold technology use in such a way that students learn without being dependent on the tools.

Scaffolding

I hadn't ever heard the term "scaffolding" until I started grad school, then it seemed like I heard the term used all the time in very different ways. It was similar to the way rhetoric was used when I started my master's program in Communication. Every professor had his or her own definition of "rhetoric," and I quickly learned that if I synthesized all of the definitions then everything was rhetoric. And if a concept is everything, maybe it's really nothing. Well, I don't think that is true of rhetoric or scaffolding. However, after having completed my doctoral program, I will admit that I still don't think I have a good defintion for scaffolding ... the kind of defintion that would make sense to an insurance agent or sales rep whom I happened to meet at a dinner party.

I recently heard a non-education person refer to scaffolding as the ugly stuff surrounding a structure that is used to help make it bright and shiny again. This definition was given in a spiritual context, so it doesn't totally apply to education. However, there are some aspects of this definition that apply to teaching and learning. The first is the notion that scaffolding is something that is eventually removed. A builder or painter does not leave the scaffolding on forever,  just a teacher strives to remove the supports that students rely on to complete academic tasks.

The second application of this definition is that the end product of learning is some sort of improvement growth. The question about what improvement or growth looks like is a totally separate topic, and the value of the such growth and improvement may differ between student and teacher. However, an underlying premise for scaffolding is that there is  an indentifiable change in what a student knows, understands or can do. Otherwise, why take the time to put the scaffolding up in the first place?

I will explore this topic more in coming posts.

Why isn’t the future what it used to be? part 2

I ran across an interesting article, which relates to my previous post about how tecnology in education rarely meets the expectations of those who see its potential for improving teaching and learning. The authors draw upon the Technology I, II and III framework for describing technologists' attitudes and beliefs about achieving desired results in learning. The framework can be described as follows:

• Technology I: the belief that using certain tools will inherently lead to better learning. The problem with this belief is that the complexitites of human learning can rarely, if ever, be addressed wholely through a single tool, or even a collection of tools.
• Technology II: the belief that using certain design approaches or processes will automatically lead to better instruction, thus increased learning. The problem with this belief is that every learner's brain does not operate in the same way, and the complexity of learning environments will invariably disrupt any systematically designed instruction. Having been the designer of instruction for several years, I know from experience that the best laid plans are at the mercy of hundreds of environmental factors which the instructor may or may not be able to anticipate or control.
• Technology III: the belief that learning situations should define which technologies and design processes to use. Practitioners who ascribe to this belief are likely to embrace many design approaches and use a variety of tools. The problem with this belief is that it's hard to maintain due to what the authors describe as technological gravity. Given time, even the most rigorous and thoughtful Technology III practitioners will slip back into patterns of preferring one tool or design approach over others, regardless of their compatibility with the task at hand. I mean, some days we just feel like standing in front of the class and lecturing from slides.

The authors propose three "habits of mind" that, if one is disciplined enough to actually do them, will fight off technological gravity. I won't go into those three disciplines right now, but they are worth considering and may work.

I've read countless articles which start off by recounting the unfulfilled promises of educational technology. I even had a section in my dissertation on this very topic, describing the prophesies of educational film, radio, television, computer-based instruction and the Internet, and their failure to deliver the goods. Just as in sports and movies, hype surrounding educational technologies is rarely lived up to. New innovations are commonly seen as a solution before we even really know what the problem is. What if the innovation causes even more problems than previously existed? Boy, talk about disappointment! Educational technology should address pre-addressed problems or goals.

The Technology III mindset is practical, and I don't think it's hard to achieve. Just be flexible and don't put too much faith in one tool or approach to teaching. Pretty simple.

Going the Distance

It's summer, which means I have once again agreed to teach a couple of online classes for a college in my hometown. I have done this intermittently for the past 7 years (either online or face-to-face), and it's always a great experience. I've tinkered with the class since the first time I taught it, and I think I am ready to roll for another semester. An article I read recently discussed multi-scaffolding for multimedia enhanced instruction, which prompted me to rethink some of the ways I'm using technology in the online class. The authors propose a typology consisting of 4 types of scaffolds:

• Situated video
• Screencasts
• Intelligent agents (virtual reality stuff)
• Collaboration zone

Though I don't think each of these types of scaffolding is essential for the classes I am teaching, it certainly provides a framework to which to compare my current practices. This is one reason I think it's so easy to get into a teaching rut. It's not that teachers don't want to do innovative and engaging things with their students, but they simply don't have a point of comparison to their current practices. Peggy Ertmer identifies a community of practice, among other things, as an essential agent in helping teachers transform their pedagogical beliefs toward the use of educational technology. Think about how hard it is to make changes in isolation, whether that change is a New Year's resolution or a new of way of doing a job you've performed for many years. Without someone to compare yourself to and offer encouragement, most ideas don't make it past the intention stage.

In my experience, online classes have been the ultimate silo. Most colleges use some sort of course management platform, and only the instructor and students have access to course materials. On one hand, this is nice because I don't want random people disrupting the class. On the other hand, no other instructors ever see what I am doing, and vice versa. In this case,  I live almost 2,000 miles from the campus, but even the instructors who occupy the same physical space don't share or discuss their teaching practices.

So, at the onset of my new summer term, I am thankful for having run across the work of Aaron Doering and his colleagues. While I may not immediately employ each of the multi-scaffolding tools in this course, I have re-thought how I might support both student learning and self-efficacy in the online environment through smarter uses of technology.

Why isn't the future what it used to be?

I ran across this article on cnn.com, and it got me to thinking about my entry into the world of educational technology. This is actually something I have been thinking a lot about lately because I recently graduated and accepted a position at a university. This transition from student to professor has caused me to think back and wonder what it was that drew me toward this profession. The fact that just about everyone I meet has asks me the same thing has something to do with it, as well. When I started teaching, I was already very much into computers. The World Wide Web was a baby and the only way I could go "online" was with the AOL software (I don't think they even called themselves AOL back then.) I was fortunate to get my first teaching job at a district that invested heavily in technology. Looking back on the resources they had even in 1995 is still astounding. Just about every lesson I taught had some sort of technology in it, though in most cases the students just watched me play with whatever tool I happened to be using. But I never really had any expectations that using the technology in my teaching was making me any better of a teacher. My classroom was nestled in between two 30-year veterans, and I looked to them as the standard for good teaching. And they didn't use technology ... at all. In fact, I had to remind them every grading period how to enter their grades into the grade book program. Every once in awhile I would do something with technology that got their attention and they would want to know how I did it.

My point is, I've never really trusted technology to do anything for me. I've always seen myself as the creative force in the classroom, and I happen to like technology and use it to do my job. One quotation from the previously mentioned article really caught my attention, and it ties in nicely to this idea. It's from Matt Verheiden, one of the writers for the recent Battlestar Galactica mini-series.

At some point, you can't expect a miracle to come in the form of technology to save us. At some point, the miracle has to come from a change in attitude and a new outlook.

So while it's entertaining to ponder whether or not some technology will be invented that seamlessly interacts with a student's brain making the whole learning process both fun and effortless, I think there is lot to be said for hard work, creativity and collaborating with other people.