Facebook profiling

This ties into what I was writing about the other day. A friend of mine mentioned this article about Facebook on, of all places, Facebook. I swear, I read this AFTER I posted about Twitter the other day. If you have the time, or if you spend any time at all on FB, you should read this. It's funny, true and a little embarrassing because we are all probably guilty of doing some of these things at one time or another. This article, and my recent post about Twitter, have really prompted me to think about how innovations cause us to constantly reframe the world. I have been telling my ed. tech. students for years that we (humans) create technology, then technology creates us. My classic example is highways. Highways were created to facilitate faster, smoother commutes from one place to another. Over time people have become dependent on highways, and as the population has grown they are getting more and more crowded. Now, instead of technology working for me, I have to arrange my life around the constraints of the technology (i.e., roads that can't handle the number of cars). Thankfully, I don't live in a city with traffic problems anymore, but that really isn't the point.

The point is, people create technology and technology, in turn, begins to shape us. Some people are dependent on their smart phones. Some people won't speak in public without presentation software. Some people feel compelled to share every minute detail of their lives. The list could go on forever.

Human personality traits have probably not changed all that much in the last 10,000 years. I knew sympathy-baiters and town-criers well before FB or Twitter existed. What's interesting is how a simple little tool -- the ability to write what's on your mind from any place at any time -- has pushed these personality traits to the forefront. Perhaps folks who fall into these categories had other outlets before FB came around. Maybe they were the chronic mass-emailers of the world. But I tend to think that technologies like this have amplified these traits in people that otherwise wouldn't have been labeled in this way.  I used to get relatively few forwarded mass emails before FB, but I receive dozens of FB invitations every day. Who has time for all these games, causes, lil' green patches, farms and mafia warfare? I barely have time to be writing this. And now that Griggs has given these personalities labels, I don't think I will ever see my FB friends in the same way.

This phenomenon is also true of the online teaching I've done. The online environment pushes some personality traits to the forefront that I otherwise wouldn't have noticed. On one hand, it's nice to see a different side of students. I actually get to know my online students pretty well, and a lot of them thrive in the online environment. But I'm also tempted to label students in different ways. And if I can label someone, it makes it easy to dismiss them. I constantly have to resist the urge to label students as ignorant because they misspell everything in the discussions or lazy because they do everything at the last minute. These particular traits aren't really that evident in the classroom environment. I find it ironic that an environment that is, inherently, more private removes some of the hiding places students use in the classroom. While I am able to conduct class in my pajamas from the kitchen, certain aspects of my personality that I can hide in public are suddenly exposed.

Just some thoughts. I'm sure this will come up again. Until then, I will go lurk around on Facebook.

I actually used Twitter today

As an avid TechCrunch reader, I have a history of creating accounts for tools they mention without really thinking about what the tool does or whether I will actually use it. One such tool was Twitter. I honestly cannot remember when I created my Twitter account, but my inaugural tweet was almost a month to the day before my twins were born. I honestly have no memory of writing either of the two tweets recorded in my account, and I don't know why I decided to post a random comment about watching my twins play on the floor in late March of 2008. I have a really good memory, and both of these events, while permanently archived in Twitter, have completely dissolved from my mind. As if this can't get any stranger, I have 22 followers. I'm practically Ashton Kutcher. It's just weird to me that 22 people either saw or searched for my name and clicked the "Follow" button. I'm sure they are very disappointed. I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident the lack of activity in Twitter can be attributed to two things: a) I don't have a cool phone that lets me tweet at anytime and any place, and b) I find it kind of obnoxious. (I try not to think that some people actually consider what I do on this blog essentially the same at tweeting.) When I see status updates on Facebook that are obviously from Twitter (e.g., @, #, bit.ly, misspelled words, etc.), I actually get annoyed and don't read what the person actually wrote. More than that, however, is the fact that I don't really have time to read up-to-the-second updates about what people are doing. Do I really care that someone I kind of knew in high school needs more coffee? Personally, I don't feel the need to tell the world that I am sitting at a traffic light or that I just ate too  much for lunch. And I am suddenly feeling the need to confess that the most chronic Twitter addicts in my Facebook network have either been de-friended or hidden. Wow, that feels better.

However, today things changed just ever so slightly. It all started when a web tool I like (Google Calendar) wouldn't load. I tried refreshing several times with no luck. I went to the Google Dashboard, but they don't even have today's date up yet. So, I had to look in the only place I knew would have realtime information on this. And I found out that some people are experiencing the same thing. There is no explanation or clue as to when it be available again, but at least Twitter let me find out that I'm not alone. It seems that this is not affecting everyone, by the way. So, rather than obsessing about this and trying to see if the problem was caused on my end, I could let it rest and get back to work.

Twitter can count this as a score in their favor. I still refuse to tweet, but if a widely-used web page won't work for me I will likely look on Twitter first. This is by no means comparable to the protests in Iran and the subsequent military crackdown, but I did get to experience firsthand the benefits of realtime data. I'm still trying to get my head around the implications this has for children growing up in the 21st Century and how these technologies will shape how they define "news." But it's an interesting thing to think about. And one more thing from curbyalexander @somerandomdude: We're all tired and ready to go home at the end of the day. But thanks for sharing.

Cookies in a Flash

When I read this article, I chuckled a little. Developers of web content and sites that host web content are getting better and better at collecting data about how people are using their tools. Some examples are Youtube's Insight and Visible Measures. The latter of these two examples actually will display in a graph when people are rewinding the scrub bar and re-watching portions of the video. Granted, I think a person has to have about 50,000 or so views for this to work, but it does give a pretty accurate display of audience engagement with a video. In the tool I helped design for my dissertation -- PrimaryAccess Storyboard -- we used something similar to Flash cookies to collect data about how the students were using the tool. This tool is built using Flash, and Bill (the programmer) was able to add in some code that records everything the user does while logged into this application. I was able to get detailed information from each student, such as when he or she logged in, whether or not they logged in after school from a different computer, every single move they made with the mouse or keyboard (I didn't know what they wrote and deleted, just the number of characters typed and deleted). I was even told how much time each student spent on task. Of course, we who have been teachers know that a general number for time on task, such as 52 minutes, does not really tell me much about what the student was doing. Using the rest of the data, I was able to see the differences in how the students used their time. Some would experiment with different images, layering them on top of each other and tinkering with the order. Other students were just playing with the tool, adding characters, spinning them around and deleting it.

This approach to data collection was not perfect, and Bill and I are still thinking about ways to make this data more useful to teachers, but it did answer a longstanding issue I have always had with technology in the classroom. Computers, just like  in other contexts, make it easy for students to look busy when they really aren't. As an observer, I was able to see how students would deftly switch between their work and Solitaire without the teacher ever noticing. Even though the data told me how long they stayed on task, I was able to infer from the rest of the data that they really weren't very engaged. And even if they looked engaged, I could see how they were spending their time. Some used the tool creatively to make the best product possible, while others played around but did not put a lot of thought into their final product.

I see a lot of potential in this kind of data collection. We can learn a lot about how students use different tools and scaffold projects in a way that anticipates these patterns. This also opens the door to looking at how teachers make instructional decisions based on the feedback they get from the students' tool use. Given what they know about how a student is using his or her time, can they make better decisions for directing student effort before the final product is turned in? I think there are lot of good questions, and hopefully some answers, that will come from this kind of data.

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.