Why digital text is here stay

As if anyone would even argue this point, I just had a flash that served as one more reminder why digital text is here to stay. This is also why The Cloud is here to stay, and why eReaders are here to stay, and why the discipline of close reading is here to stay. Here's what happened.

I was crafting an e-mail to a friend about a possible digital media study this upcoming fall. In my message, I decided to mention Jonah Lehrer's book ... again. Have I told you about his book, Imagine, lately? Do you need the hyperlink so you can buy it? Am I a sycophant yet? Anyway, there was a phrase from his book that I wanted to use (i.e., claim as my own), but I couldn't remember it. I reached to get my Kindle, and realized it was at home, as are all of my other devices that have this book on it. So, I looked up Kindle on Google, and found out they have a Cloud Reader for computers. Why wouldn't they? I mean, Amazon can sync my other devices so that when I put one down and pick up another later on, I start reading right where I left off. In a matter of 5 or so clicks, I was looking at Lehrer's book at the exact place where I stopped reading last night. I located the phrase (meta-idea), and went right back to my e-mail. Actually, I came right to my blog, then I will get back to my e-mail ... after lunch.

This kind of thing was not even possible a few years ago. If I needed to look at something in a book, I had to either bring the book with me or wait until I got home, to my office, etc. Now I have every book I own (in digital format) right in front of me whenever I need to look something up. I don't think I will ever buy another printed book again. I'm sure publishers will still send me copies of books to review, but if they ever give me the option, I want the eBook. It's important to note, I still had to read the eBook. If I want to make a note, I have to actually make the note. If something in one book makes me think of something in another book, I have to be disciplined enough to write it down before I forget. The eBook (or any digital media, for that matter) does not do the thinking for you, but boy oh boy, does it change the way I approach my scholarship. I love the Web because I find all kinds of resources I never knew existed, but what I really love is to be able to reference those resources I have already read, thought about, re-read, took notes on, and integrated into my existing knowledge base. The perfect storm of taking the time to sit still and read something, mixed with ubiquitous access when I can't remember a phrase or term or quotation. It's the epitome of distributed cognition, to me.

Oh, and my back doesn't hurt anymore from lugging around all those books.

Let's Make a Deal

This post is prompted by a Facebook post from a former colleague:

Students used to ask me if they could earn extra credit after grades were posted. Now they just ask if I will bump up their grade. Why do they ask that?

The very first semester I taught a college course, one of my students came to me with what I thought was a strange request. She admitted to me that she had not done as well in the class as she normally did, she had a lot "going on" that semester and wanted to know if I could possibly give her some extra credit to help raise her grade to a B. I thought about it, then responded to her that to give extra credit to one student meant I needed to give the same opportunity to all students. Because I was a graduate instructor for this class, my overall GPA was closely monitored. If the class average was too close to a B+, it was assumed my class wasn't very rigorous and I wasn't expecting much out of my students. I responded to my student and told her that I would not be giving post-hoc extra credit to any of the students. Consequently, in subsequent semesters, I would give all students the chance to earn extra credit by attending various speaking engagements on campus: guest lectures, convocation, etc. They would attend, sign in, write an analysis of the speaker, and get some extra points. This seemed fair at the time.

The next class I taught was a summer class at a community college, and it was not a public speaking class. So, the extra credit assignment did not really fit the subject matter. Besides, the class was offered in a quiet little town in the Rockies, and there weren't that many opportunities to hear people give speeches, unless of course, I wanted them to attend church or a school board meeting. The former is risky in a public education setting, and the latter is just plain torture. So, rather than offer extra credit, I added "participation" points into the course total. Students who came to class, participated and turned their assignments in on time received all of their points. This seemed like a cool thing to do, until I realized it was inflating my grades quite a bit and students who did rather low-quality work were still making a decent grade in my class.

This brings me to my current philosophy on extra credit, which is that I don't give it. I also don't give participation points. Students are given assignments, quizzes and in-class activities, and their final grade reflects how they did on those assignments. Ever since I decided to simplify my life and eliminate extra credit and participation points, I have noticed most of my students step up to the challenge do do pretty good work. I still get the occasional plea for extra credit, or more likely, asking if I will take a late assignment for partial credit. I always let them do this as long as it is before grades have been posted. Usually, the partial credit does keep them from failing, but their overall grade is not stellar. I never give extra credit, either corporate or individual.

So, this gets me to the FB post that prompted all of this. A new twist on this phenomenon of students asking for extra credit is for them to come right out and ask for a boost to their grade. Like my colleague, I have had at least a half dozen of these requests in the past few years. They have ranged from ...

I really, really want to make the Dean's List this semester. Is there any way you could bump me up to an A?

to ...

I'm in the "People's lives depend on my competence" Program, and I will get kicked out if I fail your class. Is there any way you could give me a D? A C would be better.

to ...

Is there any way you can bump my grade up to a B? I'm less than a point away!

This last request was actually the most recent (over the weekend), and it was obvious the student had neither read the syllabus nor totalled his points for the course. Yes, he was less than one percentage point away, but 7 actual points from a B. I looked at his scores again very carefully to make sure I didn't make an error in my calculations. Nope, Excel proved trustworthy once again. Then I looked at his scores on the papers, which can be a little more subjective. No, he did fine on those. I then looked at his exam scores. Ouch! Someone had not been doing his reading, and when I saw that 18% on the final, I knew his final grade would stand.

My motto has always been "I won't do something for students they aren't willing to do for themselves." My other motto is "A student's grade should be based on his effort, not mine." OK, both of my mottoes -- which I don't go around reciting, by the way -- have some holes in them, but you get the point. There is a growing attitude among some college students that they are flipping the bill for college and it's the professor's obligation to smooth the road out along the way. Any hint of frustration or micro-failure (as opposed to macro-failure, such as failing out of school) along the way means the professor isn't doing his or her job. I guess I see it differently.

Imagine you bought a house. The bank lends you the money for that house, but once you take possession it is completely your responsibility. If you live there for 4 years, make some improvements, keep it clean and stay caught up on general maintenance, there is a good chance you will be able to get a return on the investment. If you live there 4 years, have keggers every weekend, punch holes in the walls, let the lawn die and allow the place to get grungy, it isn't because the bank sold you a bad house. The bank also didn't fail to do their job. The truth is, maintaining and improving a house is hard work, and it never really ends as long as you own the home. This is kind of how I see a college education. The student is making an investment, but what he or she does with that investment is completely up to the student. It should involve some frustration and micro-failures along the way, as well as an understanding that some subjects just can't be made easier. (A great explanation of the role of criticism and frustration in the creative, and learning, process can be found in Jonah Lehrer's book, Imagine.) They're hard because they're hard. Which reminds me, if you found college Calculus easy, I hate you. But you're also my hero.

This is where I will end this. I have spent the last decade or so trimming the fluff out of my courses and helping my students understand that things which are hard are hard for a reason, and it's not because I suck at my job. I promise my classes that I will come to every single class meeting fully prepared with well thought-out activities, examples and food for discussion. I take my job seriously. I also expect them to show up fully prepared with well thought-out questions (and challenges) to the material I make them consume, and that they take their jobs seriously. For each assignment, they start at "0" and work their way up, so there is never any need to ask why I "took points off." I will explain every single point (or lack of) in my comments. If they come to every class meeting prepared and do every project to the best of their ability, they won't fail. I will answer every question they have, no matter how stupid they think it sounds. If they are good stewards of the "credits" they have sitting in front of them as they plan and complete their assignments, there won't be any need to ask for extra credit at the end of the term. B, or C for that matter, is not a failing grade. And no, I will not bump you up a grade, no matter how much you think you deserve it. That devalues the work done by your classmates who actually earned that same grade without any special treatment.

So, what are your stories about bizarre (audacious, narcissistic, self-indulgent, etc.) student requests? How do you handle the issue of extra credit or participation grades? I would love to broaden my perspective on this issue.

Mine, Yours and Ours

This semester was one of the more challenging I've had since I began teaching college. For one, I was teaching 4 classes: three undergrad and one grad. Three of the classes were completely online, and the other was hybrid. The hybrid class and grad class were at a large university in my city, and the other two classes were at a small community college about a thousand miles away. Confused yet? Good, because that is how I felt most of the semester. What made this particular semester even more challenging was the nature of the courses I was teaching. I call them Mine, Yours and Ours, and each course presented its own set of challenges.

Mine

I have taught these online sections of the same class for about 7 years. This began as an experiment, and it was so popular within the community college setting in which it was offered that they asked me to teach more sections. For three years I only taught in the summer, then I was asked to pick up one section in the fall and spring, and now I am teaching two sections each semester and two each summer. This particular course can be used as a substitute for basic composition, and apparently there are a lot of students who do not want to take basic composition. This class still requires the students to do quite a bit of writing, but the crux of each assignment is not me pointing out the deficiencies in their writing. (Of which. There. Are. Many.) I focus more on their content, but I still point out areas of their writing that need to be improved in the subsequent papers. Anyway, the course is not that hard and students who stay on track all semester almost always make an A. Everyone else usually makes a D or F. Seriously.

I could easily teach this class in my sleep. I know exactly when each assignment is due, what I am looking for from each student, and I can usually successfully guide students back on track when they show signs of dropping out. One of my sections this semester did kind of implode (only 10 out of 23 students completed the class), but this is the first time this has happened. When I finally hand this class over to someone else, which I will be doing in the fall, I feel pretty confident that I know it well enough to help the new instructor get off to a good start. In other words, I feel like I totally own this course and have command of what happens throughout the semester. In fact, most of the teaching I have done throughout my career falls into the Mine category. For good or bad, it's my course.

Yours

Another of my courses this semester was an online graduate course. When I was asked to teach this curse ... I mean, course ... I felt pretty confident I would be able to do it just from the title. I promptly found out which books the professor had been using, obtained desk copies and proceeded to look through her syllabus. I contacted her former teaching assistant, and this is when I found out about something called Intellectual Property. I already knew what this was, but what I didn't know was that at this particular school that meant I was supposed to teach the course "as is." The lessons, assignments, discussions, etc. were already loaded into Blackboard and all I had to do was show up.  This didn't sound so bad at first, but as I began looking at the assignments I knew this was going to be very challenging. Maybe I am just immature, but I found it REALLLLY hard to enforce assignments with students that I never would have given in the first place. I never really got control of my serve the entire semester, and I think the main reason was that I felt such little ownership of the course. Many of the assignments were outdated, the technology the students were using was definitely outdated, and some of the tasks the students were asked to perform were not even possible in the most recent versions of the software. To add insult to injury, I was not allowed to have access to the server the students were using to host their websites. When they would e-mail me with questions about uploading (or Putting, in this case), I didn't know exactly how to help them because I did not have access to Put files on the server. How can you help someone with something you have never done before?!? I could not even see the files on the back end to tell them if they were in the right directory or not.

I have taught this exact course at another university, but I completely designed and implemented it myself. I was able to answer student questions (and challenges) with confidence because everything that was there was something I put there. The students learned a lot, and the evaluations turned out pretty good. I will not even look at the evaluations for this class. Had it not been for the fact that this class was made up of pretty motivated Master's students, this would have been a total disaster. I am willing to bet the students already think it was.

Ours

The final class I taught this semester, a hybrid course at a large university, would mostly be described as a team effort. The course outline was made up of several topics I chose myself and some that were "part of the course." Most of the course policies were my decision (attendance, late work, participation), while others were required to be  common across all sections (readings, exams). This course has historically been a source of student data using a battery of attitude and self-efficacy instruments, so there were some lessons that we were all encouraged to teach in order to assess changes in those areas. Some of the modules for this course were designed as part of a grant-funded project, and I taught them for all of the instructors. This was quite time consuming, but it did give me a chance to refine my teaching strategy over several iterations, which is good for improving my personal instruction. Most of the instructors for this class give the same assignments, though they differ in how they are graded and how much work the students are expected to do. The area in this course with the most variation was in the final project. Without going into a lot of detail, this varied greatly across different sections of the course. I guess the bottom line here is that overall this is a good course, but the student experience is very different depending on who is teaching the section.

Take-Aways

My experience with teaching this semester gave me a front-row seat into some of the big issues facing higher-ed teaching in this era.

1. Canned content : college courses :: canned food : nutrition. I believe it was necessary for me to teach a pre-planned course of someone else's content in order to experience how utterly horrible this is as an educational model. Yet, there are dozens of institutions, both non- and for-profit, that follow this model. My experience with being given a course shell already populated with assignments, readings, discussions and projects was nothing short of disastrous. The entire course, from the terminology to the tools to the links, was out of date. Can I get a "screencast" from the congregation? How about a screenshot? Maybe a video lecture where the slides and voice-over are in the same file? Nothing. This notion of taking a course shell, changing the dates on the syllabus and serving it like yesterday's meatloaf is not as efficient as some people think it is. Instruction is not some thing (i.e., knowledge) that is delivered through a human to other humans. It is the act of a human taking a thing (subject matter) and transforming it into a learning experience for other humans. If a person can gather a bunch of resources and teach himself something new, that's great, but it isn't teaching, and I'm pretty sure universities do not intend to build themselves on this self-help model. If the "teacher" is just the person who makes sure Blackboard is working and points students to the person who actually has access to the server, then why in the world did I bother getting a Ph.D.? Where is the expertise in that?!?
2. I have completely re-thought my strategy for handing over my online course this fall. My original plan was put everything in a folder, burn it to a disc and giving it to the new instructor. Given the chance that the new instructor might take my content and do what I was forced to do with the grad class, I will probably only give the new instructor as many resources as he needs to get started. I think there is some value in having to think through the course and make decisions about what to assign, and when. The new instructor should come up with his own tests and assignments based on what he thinks is important to know. I have lived with the course so long, I may be missing the point entirely and don't even know it. I want to be helpful, but I also want what is best for the students. And after my experience with the online grad class, I think that what's best for the students is when the instructor puts his or her advanced degree to good use and brands the course with his or her brain, perspective and creativity, not someone else's.
3. Standardized courses are really tricky. My first experience with a standardized course was a public speaking class at a large university that ran between 60-65 section each semester. It was required, in classes of 20-25 students, for every single undergraduate in the university. I don't think there was one graduate instructor, adjunct or professor who taught the class exactly as it was supposed to be taught. I think they were all pretty similar, but you can't expect intelligent, creative individuals to teach something in the exact same way. The hybrid course I taught is a completely unique experience from section to section, and I think that is OK. But you also want to ensure that in a certification program, as this one is, all students are held to the same standards. Standards vs. Personalization. That is a really hard balance to find, and it is something I will have to think about a lot this summer. In the fall I am teaching a 100+ student course with several TAs to "manage" smaller groups of students. I want the TAs to be themselves and explore their own style, but I also want each student held to the same standards. No shortcuts. No trying to win cool points by being lax. Again, I had to have this experience with a multi-section standardized course because I am about to be in charge of one myself.

Every semester I have taught at the college level has been so different. Nothing has played out exactly the same way twice. No two groups of students have responded exactly the same way to the same project, story or reading. This is what makes it fun, but it also makes it incredibly challenging. The only thing that is guaranteed is that nothing is guaranteed. Oh, and cliches. You are guaranteed to see a few of those if you read my blog.

Podcasting and Learning

I've been orbiting and occupying this big ol' Ed Techy world for quite a long time. So, I've read countless papers, proposals, articles, and chapters on "Why my media is better for learning than your media." I've studied this from a cognitive, social, motivational, and developmental perspective, and I am still not convinced that one medium is better for learning than any other. I do believe that all media have different affordances that make them better-suited for certain contexts, learning styles or learning tasks. Needless to say, I've done (and continue to do) my homework  on this one, and I get a little annoyed when people who just perhaps haven't done as much homework on this topic make blanket statements like this one:

 A new study found that students who listen to lectures on podcasts test better than those who listen in class. (You can read the entire article here.)

The "new study" in question is taken from a 2009 article in New Scientist, and it's reporting on a study done in the same year by Dani McKinney. I found these links in a 2012 blog post by Michael Hyatt. My issue is not with bloggers quoting bloggers quoting bloggers, some of whom don't understand educational technology research. The problem I have with this quote, and those like it, is that it is stated as if this were "proven" fact. Here are some things to consider when reading results from this type of research:

1. Learning is complex and influenced by many, many factors: motivation, engagement, prior knowledge, environment, aptitude AND delivery method. To say that students who listen to a podcast at home will score better on a test than those who come to class and listen to the lecture is absurd. This can lead to all kinds of misconceptions about learning, multi-tasking, learning styles and media. "You can learn astrophysics while washing the dishes and updating your Facebook status!"
2. Most educational technology research studies have a long list of limitations. The findings are almost always limited to the study in question, with some suggestions on how to scale it up or replicate the results. This is called "job security" for us academic types.
3. Teacher-created exams may not be the best measure for student learning. Sure, they're great for assigning grades, but they are often mismatched with the learning objectives, and if they are multiple choice, there's a chance the students could guess and get the right answer. The test items may also be written in such a way that it is easy to eliminate answer choices and choose the right one without really knowing the material. I did not read the entire research article, so I will not make any judgments about this instructor's exam.

Online and hybrid learning environments are here to stay, and the research into best practices and learning outcomes for this model of teaching will only get broader and better. Studies such as the one I reference above are an important part in this process and must be done. Any research study should produce more questions than answers, which this one obviously did (Do podcast lectures have the same effect over an entire semester?) But please, if you are going to quote studies like this, look at the original research article and temper your statements with a qualifier or two. Michael Hyatt and Mile Elgan have thousands and thousands of readers. If I go back and read this tonight, I will have one. People believe what they read, and they especially believe what they read when they WANT to believe it. If you want to do better on tests, or learn something new, try the time-tested strategy of applying yourself and taking ownership of your learning. Don't expect media, podcasts or otherwise, to do for you what you aren't willing to do for yourself.

Wikispaces: One-stop shopping for digital learning

In the past several years, I have come to rely on Web-based website builders quite extensively in my teaching. I typically use Google Sites for the bulk of my Web content with my classes, and it has always been very reliable. I have noticed lately that the editor doesn't always load in the newest versions of Firefox. This isn't a big deal because I can jump over to Safari and finish whatever edits I need to do.

Anyway, what started as a way to write lesson plans without having to move files with me wherever I went has evolved into a complete lecture management tool. I started using SeedWiki circa. 2005 because I found myself planning my lectures at odd times, using a host of different computers. Using a wiki was a perfect solution because I could log in from anywhere and pick up where I had left off. I also liked the wiki because I could paste links and other resources directly into the page. It was a great tool.

Eventually, I started giving my class the link to my lecture notes in SeedWiki, and it wasn't long before I was using the wiki as the hub to my class meetings. I got this idea, in part, from someone else, and though I have switched tools I still use this method for managing class meetings. Some of the basics methods that I use a wiki for include:

• Time management: I would organize each section of the class meeting using cells in a table, including the amount of time I thought we would spend on each section. Each section of the class meeting has relevant links, embedded videos, documents, etc.
• Collaborative Learning: Keeping track of group work and collaborative learning can be a nightmare. One area of my teaching that I noticed was in serious need of improvement was keeping the class on track during group discussions. We've all seen this technique used, and it did not come naturally to me. What I noticed in many instances was that the students would spend about 60 seconds discussing the topic, then they would digress into conversation and have nothing to show for their work. Essentially, group discussions lacked accountability and there was no incentive for staying on task. What I began to do, and do to this day, is determine ahead of time how many groups the class would be divided into and create that many pages as part of the class wiki. Each group would then summarize their discussion on the assigned page. I was able to get creative too, throwing in such tasks as finding a random picture on the web, or finding a movie clip that corresponded to their main idea. As soon as the group clicked save, I was able to display their summary to the rest of the class. I had a built-in record of what each group talked about, and because anyone could edit the page, no sign-in was required.
• Lecture Archive: Because everything that we covered, as well as what we did in class, was saved to the wiki for that day, I had a detailed archive of the class meeting. More detailed than I could have created on my own because the class helped me do it. So, when a student would come to class and ask that question that all professors love to hear ("Did we cover anything important last week?"), I could point them to the wiki and tell them that EVERYTHING on the page for that day is important.

About the time that SeedWiki went under, Google Sites (which used to be JotSpot) came around. I was already a big Gmail and Google Docs user at this point, so it made sense to start using Google Sites to manage my lecture notes. The tool itself is very stable and easy to use, but it was not ideal for collaborative learning. Students had to have Google Account and be added one-by-one to the Site before they could log in and participate in the learning activities. This may not sound like a big deal, but there were just enough moving parts that it became a nuisance. Remember, college students are basically high school students with no curfew and more access to beer, and many of them are not good at keeping track of their information. Just to give my students permission to co-edit the class Site, they had to:

1. Open a Google Account
2. Send me the e-mail address they used to open the Google Account
3. Respond to my invitation to join the class Google Site
4. Remember their log in information

When you go to start a class activity and half the class can't access the Site, it gets pretty frustrating. UVa eventually moved to Google Apps for student e-mail accounts, so this reduced some of the friction, but it was still very clunky. In Google Sites' defense, I don't think they ever intended for the tool to be used in this way, and restricting editing access to only those with permission is a security measure.

Recently, I rediscovered Wikispaces, and I think the tool has come along to point where I will start using it exclusively for all of my lecture management needs. I typically use Wikispaces about twice per semester with each of my classes, but I am starting to see how it is much more effective than Google Sites for use in a learning environment. First of all, the teacher can add users to a wiki in bulk. All you do is create  a spreadsheet with usernames and passwords, and upload it to the wiki. Students then have access to the wiki, and they didn't have to sign up or respond to a confirmation e-mail. This option is superior to making the wiki editable by anyone, as you will see later.

Second, you can create Projects within the wiki. These projects are partitioned off from the rest of wiki, making it much easier to manage each activity. Otherwise, the list of your wiki's pages gets to be pretty burdensome and hard to manage. Every time you create a new project, you can drag-n-drop the names of students into different teams, or you can let Wikispaces randomly assign students to teams. This is great for mixing up student groupings and getting students out of their comfort zones. The alternative is letting the students always pick their own groups and essentially work with the same people all semester.

Finally, there is a Discussion tab for each page, which you can use in several different ways. You can have students follow up with group projects by discussing key questions in a back channel. I haven't used this particular feature much, but I plan on using it more.

There are many reasons to use a wiki to manage your class meetings, some of which I have discussed here. What are some other ways you have used a wiki as part of your teaching?

Saving the world one student at a time

When I arrived at UNT, one of the projects already underway in the research center where I work was MSOSW (Middle Schoolers Out to Save the World). The focus of this project is to increase middle school students' interest in science, technology, engineering and math through a problem-based unit focused on energy conservation. The students participating in this project, which included schools from Texas, Louisiana, Maine and Vermont, use Watts Up? devices to measure the amount of vampire energy used by the electronic devices in their homes. This project involves a lot of in-depth learning about energy consumption, carbon emissions, measurement units for energy and power, energy costs, carbon footprint, stand-by power and product design. In addition to these concepts, the students are required to do a lot of math for conversions, and they must use a spreadsheet. Because I see such value in these types of projects, I wanted my pre-service teachers to experience firsthand what it looks like to complete a problem-based unit from beginning to end. I observed this unit being taught last year at Good Shepherd Episcopal School, but I had never actually planned and taught it myself. Let me tell you, the planning was much more time intensive than I had assumed, and I ended up staying up late one night to get all of the materials ready.

The first thing I did was put my students into groups of 2. I normally let them pick their own partners, but they have gotten, how shall we say, comfortable this semester, and I wanted to break them out of their apathetic little comfort zone. The next thing I did was set up a Google Presentation for each group. I wanted them to see how this tool worked, so I created one for each group and set them up so anyone could edit. The next thing I did was lay out the project on Glogster. I was never really happy with how this turned out, but you can see it here. The process of setting up this glog (their term, not mine) required me to go find all of the resources I wanted them to have for the project. This included a carbon footprint calculator, a vampire energy calculator, a graph maker, a couple of videos and a spreadsheet for entering some data. As the pre-service teachers went through this project, I had them report their information in the Google Presentation along the way. I also brought a few Watts Up? devices to the lab and hooked them up to a monitor, a CPU tower, the printer and the document projector. I wanted them to do the math required to calculate how much energy the lab uses in a 24 hour period. Overall, they did a really nice job and completed the whole activity, even though it was not for a grade (I will grade it in the future, I think).

Here are a few lessons learned from this tech-rich problem-based unit:

1. Pre-service teachers actually like this kind of work. I have to say, this was hard and the students really struggled with some of the math and science concepts. But they stuck with it and took the topic seriously. I would even go so far as to say they learned something about energy conservation from doing this. I also hope they learned something about using this teaching strategy with students
2. Glogster is kind of cool, but it has been extremely unstable and unreliable lately. On several occasions I have logged on and gotten some sort of "We will be down for the next 36 hours, but we are adding some really awesome new features!" Well, when I go to retrieve my work from a Web tool and it is not there, I'm done with that tool. That is a total deal breaker for me. So, Glogster, I am sure your new design is really awesome, but you let me down on several occasions and I'm done. I will also not be pointing my students to this tool because it let many of them down too.
3. When you set up a Google Presentation to be edited by anyone with the link, it will not let you import images. The students made a graph that was exported as a JPEG, and I wanted them to import it into a slide. Google Presentation wouldn't let them do it, so we found a very bothersome work-around. If we pasted the image in a PPT slide, we could copy and paste the graph into the Google Presentation (but only if we use CTRL-V, not the mouse). I don't know if this was a bug in the new re-design of Google Presentation, or if they have this feature disabled for when anonymous users are editing a document. Either way, it was annoying and slowed the process down temporarily. In a K-12 classroom, this could mean the difference between a project going well and the whole thing crumbling in your hands. I do have to own this one, though, because I never tried to edit a presentation or insert an image as an anonymous user. I should have done this beforehand, but I just took for granted that it would work.
4. Google Spreadsheet worked like a champ, and I will definitely use it in the future for activities like this. I have used this tool for years, but I had never seen multiple people entering in data at once. The students also thought this was really cool.
5. The Vampire Energy Calculator is very cool, and I think this is what really brought the project home for the students. Even the act of physically dragging electronics into different rooms made this more like a simulation than a calculator. It's a very well-designed tool.

So, that is my first attempt at teaching the MSOSW unit, but it will not be my last. I already have some ideas for how to make it better next time, and I hope this is serves as a catalyst for some students to begin envisioning this type of instruction in their own classrooms.

Digital Fabrication, take two

Yesterday I was asked to cover a class for one of my colleagues, so I planned another round of digital fabrication activities for his students. I had done the same thing last week with another colleague's class, using the materials I developed last year. The first attempt last week did not go nearly as well as I remembered the activities going last year, so I was motivated to rethink how I was presenting the content, as well as the activity I was having them do. The "old" activity was challenge that involved designing a container for tootsie rolls that would maximize the surface area:volume ratio. The concept was good, and the students approached it with enthusiasm. However, it turns out that their math abilities were a pretty major roadblock to getting anything substantive out of the activity. After the box was built and they stuffed it with tootsie rolls, the learning was basically over. This issue has roots in several factors that are true of most preservice teachers.

1. Preservice teachers' pedagogical knowledge has more to do with their worldview than their aptitude or attitude. Since most of them were taught from a traditional approach, the chasm between problem-based design activities and the lecture-test-essay model they are used to is a quantum leap. The problem is not that they are resistant to new pedagogical approaches; they simply have very little, if anything, to which to anchor them.
2. Before preservice teachers can understand something as a teacher, they need to take a step back and experience it as a student. Activities, therefore, need to be authentic and replicate, as much as possible, the way it might be done in a classroom.
3. Based on the previous two observations, if the instructor wants preservice teachers to abstract pedagogical principles from an authentic activity, he or she is going to have to lead them there. You can't expect inexperienced teachers coming from a traditional paradigm to naturally make connections between the activity they just did and broader educational ideas. It's like giving someone from a remote tribe in the Amazon rainforest a debit card and expecting him to naturally gravitate to an ATM and get some cash. The notion that there is "money" in a "bank" that can be "accessed" remotely just does not mesh with the way he thinks the world works.
4. Finally, authentic activities must be accessible. That is, they can not be too hard nor too easy. If the activity is too easy, the preservice teachers think it is fluff and busy work; if it's too hard, they can't envision themselves teaching that way. Either extreme will likely reinforce the worldview you are trying to change.

To improve on the previous activity, with these observations in mind, I designed the following challenge:

1. I started by describing the mentality of many students today, which is that every task they are given in school has a right answer, and their goal as students is to get the right answer the first time. Many teachers reinforce this mentality by how they conduct their classes. At present, the world works much differently than classrooms do. In the world, we encounter problems to which we must develop solutions. These problems are typically ...
• Ill-defined: the cause of the problem may not be readily apparent
• Ill-structured: because we don't know the cause, we don't know where to start exploring solutions
• Complex: there are many factors involved, each of which influences the other, and we don't know how changing one factor influences the other factors
2. I then tell them the story of William, a 14-year old boy from Malawi who had to drop out of school because is family was literally starving to death. They could no longer pay for his education, so he used the library to try to educate himself. From reading physics and "green" energy books, he got the idea of improving his family's way of life by building a windmill and generating electricity for his home. Using the images and diagrams from a book on wind energy (he was not able to read English very well at the time), he built his own windmill from old car, tractor and bicycle parts and provided electricity for his home. Soon, people from all over came to his house to charge their cell phones. Not long after this, he built another windmill to pump water to irrigate his family's crops.
3. I transition to the next point by telling the students that William solved his problem by using the resources available to him to create a solution to his problem. This took several attempts, and you can see how he improved his design from the first windmill to the second. In the same way, teachers need to provide opportunities for their students to solve problems using their available resources. Since there is no single right answer, students must be evaluated using different criteria.
4. I then talked about a new set of resources that students have access to. We talk for a minute about how everything they use now was first designed in a virtual 3D environment before it became a physical object we can use. I took a minute to show them ModelMaker, a simple tool for creating 3D shapes from 2D cut-outs.
5. I then explained the challenge, which was create a windmill that was able to lift a bucket of tootsie rolls. They would construct their windmill using card stock, a pencil and masking tape, and they would design their bucket using ModelMaker. The group able to lift the most tootsie rolls would win the  challenge, the prize for which was getting to eat as many tootsie rolls as they wanted. :-)

Here are some pictures of the activity ...

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In summary, this activity was a vast improvement over the previous activity. The preservice teachers were able to see for themselves how their design choices affected the way their windmill functioned. Some groups created a "cute" windmill that would not spin, while others created an aesthetically bland windmill that performed wonderfully. Some groups put more focus on the size of their container than they did on the design of their windmill, and one group created a wonderful windmill but their bucket too small. Had the bucket been bigger, they were convinced it could have carried the most tootsie rolls. For some of them, the fact that they created a machine that actually worked was very rewarding in itself. I will do some follow up with my own students to document their reactions, but my impression was that this was effective and worthwhile. And in the spirit of engineering and the design process, there was room for improvement.

The 15-minute Experiment

One tool I have used with students for several years is a wiki. I have personally used wikis for group work, class websites and digital portfolios. However, I have had a hard time coming up with a good activities for my students that really demonstrate the affordances of a wiki (group editing, version history, comments and discussion, etc.) beyond the ability to just create a web page. In fact, my experiences were always similar to Melissa Cole, who had a lot of great ideas for using a wiki in her class but struggled to get buy-in from her class. I have had the same problem in the past, where I would set up a semester-long collaborative project for students to build a collective knowledge base. These projects always started out strong before interest fizzled after a few weeks. One interesting piece from Cole's article was the brief taxonomy of wiki usage, taken from Tonkin (2005):

1. Single-user. This allows individual students to write and edit their own thoughts and is useful for revision and monitoring changes in understanding over time.
2. Lab book. This enables students to peer review notes kept online by adding, for example, commentary or annotations to existing lecture notes or seminar discussions.
3. Collaborative writing. This can be used by a team for joint research such as a group project, essay or presentation.
4. Creating a topical knowledge repository for a module cohort. Through collaborative entries students create course content that supplements and extends delivered material.

I don't think this list is exhaustive, but it got me to thinking. How could I show my students the power of collective knowledge without giving them a project that would drag on forever, while harnessing knowledge each student currently possessed?

Well, I came up with the following idea:

Imagine you were each asked to speak to a group of students new to UNT about tips for being successful in their first semester. In other words, what do you wish you had known as an incoming student? Chances are you could come up with several good tips. But what would happen if three or four of you collaborated on the same talk? You would probably be able to come up with an even better list of suggestions for incoming students. What you will do in the next 15 minutes is collectively tap into your knowledge and experience and provide incoming students with a knowledge base that might be helpful to their transition to UNT (assuming they take your advice).

The result was this wiki, which I created using WikiSpaces. The end result is not totally impressive, and you can see that some of the students took this opportunity to be kind of silly (which I can relate to ... I was always that kid in the class). But what was interesting was the reaction from many of the students when we debriefed about this activity. For most of them, they got it. They were able to see in a  short amount of time that many people can collectively put their heads together and create something useful (e.g., Wikipedia, though that experiment has taken many years to create).

On the technical side, there was quite a lot of work I had to do beforehand to make this experiment truly 15 minutes. Here is the rundown:

1. Set up the wiki
2. I took advantage of the free teacher upgrade, which allowed me to add users in bulk. This takes about a day to do, since wikispaces wants to verify your .edu or k12 e-mail address.
3. Created a CSV file with a username and password for each of my students.
4. Uploaded the file and created the student accounts.
5. Distributed the usernames and passwords to my class (via Moodle)

I demonstrated this process to the class as well, in case they wanted to try it themselves. I think this is an activity I will include in the future, and I may even have my students edit or add to the existing entries in addition to creating their own. I may have to find a new topic before long if this one becomes saturated, but I think there are still several topics that haven't been addressed.

So, how do you use wikis in your teaching?

Inspiration is for amateurs

This time of year, when there so much to do, I find it hard to get motivated to do some of the things (e.g., grading) that I don't want to do. This morning as I was driving to work, I was reminded of an interview I once saw with Chuck Close, a professional artist. He has these words for anyone who is emerging with their profession:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

This is a popular quotation, and for good reason. If I treat motivation (inspiration) like it is something that I must have before I can do anything meaningful or productive, I will end up wasting a lot of time. I have experienced this first hand recently with my writing, where I have been much more systematic about chipping away at manuscripts than I have in the past. There have actually been studies about this, and they show that writers who set aside smaller chunks of time each day for writing actually get more done that writers who set aside larger chunks on a couple of days or who set aside a whole day. This seems counter-intuitive, but having squandered many  a "writing day," I guess it wouldn't hurt to try it. After I get this figured out, the question will shift to, how do I get my students to adopt this philosophy?

Digital Portfolio tools

These days I am thinking a lot about digital portfolios. I have been looking at a lot of them, talking a lot about them and coincidentally, evaluating a lot of them. So that I don't forget all of this by next Fall, I want to put my thoughts down and try to galvanize some of the lessons I have learned this semester. I presented this project at the very beginning of the semester. I think this was overwhelming to some of the students, but my objective was to make sure they knew about their portfolio all semester. I knew some (or many) of them would put this off until the last minute, but I also knew some of the students would appreciate getting an early start. So, I discussed with them the purpose of a portfolio, and we also talked about digital footprints and job searches and other big ideas. Then I showed them some examples of different portfolios from former students using a variety of different tools. The last thing I had them do was open an account with the tool they wanted to use, then send me the URL of their portfolio.

Tool	Pros	Cons
Google Sites	This is an easy tool to use. The interface is simple, and it is easy to find the features you are looking for. There aren't any hidden features or misplaced menus, just a simple set of tools, layouts and themes to choose from. I have used this tool for several years as a way to organize my lectures, and it works great for this. File uploading is especially easy because it is done directly on the page rather than in a dashboard. You can choose to hide the attachments on each page, then create a link to them. Sites builds the menu as you create pages, so the navigation is almost a no-brainer. You can also easily embed videos, slideshows, images and docs from Google's other services. If you a Google apologist, like me, you will find this very easy and convenient to use.	There aren't really that many options when it comes to the look and feel of your Google Site. There are some nice themes, but there is nothing that really stands out or looks flashy (if that is what you are going for). As one of my students put it, "I want my portfolio to look cute." Not exactly my objective when making a portfolio, but that's important to some people. You are able to customize the appearance of the Google Sites, but it takes some time and a little HTML know-how. This is not something a lot of preservice teachers want to dive into.
WikiSpaces	Like Google Sites, this tool is incredibly easy to use. The interface is very similar to Google Sites, and there are a lot of widgets that allow you to add different media to each page. The file manager is quite different than Google Sites, but it is very easy to use. Each page also has a discussion section, so you can center conversations around each page, as well as see the history for the page. This is quite different than Google Sites, where most of this information is hidden. The History tool is nice if I need to see when a page was last edited (as in, after the deadline). I don't make a big deal about this unless it is a major edit. Aside from being a pretty good portfolio tool, WikiSpaces is a great environment for teaching wikis and collaborative knowledge building. To demonstrate the power of collaborative knowledge building, I had my class collectively make this wiki in about 15 minutes.	Like Google Sites, this options for layout and themes are pretty spartan. Some people like this, including me, so it really isn't a con. But the cuteness factor is pretty low. You can customize the website to some degree, but you will have to live with some of the layout features. You will also need to change some of the settings as soon as you create your wiki. The default setting is for anyone to be able to edit the site. If you are using this tool to create a portfolio, you will want to turn that feature off and make yourself the only editor.
Webs	This tool is where you start to trade ease of use for look and feel. The first two tools look very much like something you would expect from a wiki. Webs looks more like a professional website. You have a lot of options in terms of themes and layouts, and they all look very nice.	If you choose to use this tool, be prepared to spend some time messing around with it. I have done a lot of blogging, web design, web mastering, etc., so I was able to make sense of Webs pretty easily. My students, however, struggled with this tool. Once they spent some time with it, the interface started to make sense. I would not recommend this tool to novice web creators. Unless you upgrade to the paid service, you also have to put up with ads on your website. Personally, I wouldn't want ads for reducing belly fat (pictures included!) on my educational portfolio.
Wix	Of all the tools, this one looks the best. Wix is built on Flash, so it looks very professional and, well, flashy. You are able to upload about any kind of file, and Wix has built in widgets to play and display media. The majority of my students were drawn to this tool because they look so good.	Intimidated by new tools? Not familiar with web design? Don't choose this tool. It is NOT for beginners. I had many students choose Wix, and I was able to walk most of them through it. Some of them bailed out and went for Google Sites or WikiSpaces. You will spend a lot of time formatting and figuring out the layout. The end result is a fantastic-looking portfolio, but you will put a lot of sweat equity into it.  The most frustrating feature in this tool, which is true of Webs as well, is embedding a YouTube video. By far, the clunkiest I have EVER seen. This is disappointing considering how well some of the other features work. I guess the developers ran out of steam.
Weebly	This tool is surprisingly easy to use. I am least familiar with it because I didn't have any students choose it. This is how I usually master a web tool, by answering all of their questions. The interface is drag and drop, and even though some of the features (e.g., file uploading) aren't very intuitive, the overall ease of use is a plus.	The free service does not include most of the cool features Weebly has to offer. They tease you with a host of widgets and options, but when you try to add them to your page you get a pop-up telling you they are only available for Premium customers. This might not be a bad idea for someone who wants to keep this portfolio around after the class (or graduation) is over, but I am realistic enough to admit that most of my students drop this project like a hot rock once they have a grade.

So, there is a simple breakdown of tools you can use for a digital portfolio. This is not exhaustive, nor is it very detailed. But there is enough information to get someone started. I will still recommend Google Sites and WikiSpaces to my students, and I am pretty sure they will still choose Webs and Wix. They're like moths to a porch light. The good thing is, the more of them that choose Wix and Webs, the better I will learn them and the better my support will be.

What tools do you use for digital portfolios? Am I missing anything obvious? Let me know!