EdTech Connect

Teaching Journal: After Teaching English 160 (Fourth Attempt)

2008-11-20T22:32:46Z

Today I substitute taught English 160 once again. I think it will be the last attempt for the semester, though who knows?

The students are getting ready to do some peer evaluations on their recommendation reports (a draft of which is due in class on December 2). In order to help them understand what they need to be looking for, Dr. Northcut (through me) asked the students to evaluate a sample recommendation report submitted by a student in a previous class (from 2007). The students in today's class session were given the rubric that Dr. Northcut will use to grade their recommendation reports.

Before class (yesterday), I sent out an email to all of the students notifying them of the assignment they would be working on. I also listed some of the objectives for this assignment:

The objectives of this exercise are as follows:

Apply the grading criteria that will be used on you towards someone else's sample recommendation report.
Perform a truly collaborative task by developing a unified document to be submitted to a third party.
Work within a time constraint to create a document (happens to me ALL THE TIME!).
Give you the opportunity to evaluate not only the recommendation report but the grading rubric itself. If you see a potential difficulty with the rubric, feel free to voice your opinion in your memo--but you will need to back up any assertions with a well-reasoned argument!

When the students arrived in class, I asked them if they had received this email. I got a noncommittal response from most of the students. One student flat-out admitted he saw the email but didn't read it. I wonder if he is going to tell his boss in the real world that he doesn't read the boss's emails?

I asked the students to separate themselves into small groups (3-4 people) and prepare a memo analyzing the sample recommendation report in context with the grading rubric they had been given. They had to submit the memo to me via email by the end of the class period. I mostly wandered around the room and made sure they stayed on the task at hand and answered questions about the assignment as best I could.

One group managed to "finish" about 15 minutes before the end of class. Of course, by my own standards, they had barely gotten started, but I think they did make some valid critiques of the sample recommendation report.

Perhaps the most interesting challenge of the day was when a student pulled me aside for a private chat. Apparently he has been having some personal issues that have been affecting his academic performance lately. Of course, I won't go into any detail here. I am actually quite honored that he respected me enough to share such personal details in confidence, though I am sorry that he is going through a "rough patch" just now. Fortunately, he seemed to get through the class just fine with his fellow group members.

Dealing with a student's personal problems is not something they really teach you how to deal with as an instructor (as far as I know). I guess we instructors just have to learn to adapt to the changing environment of the classroom. Another student in the class that I am grading papers for (also English 160, though it is a distance course run out of Columbia) has also been having some rough times lately. I don't know what else to say about that except that students do have lives outside of classroom, so we need to make some adjustments to help them out as best we can without compromising the integrity of the classroom or lowering our grading standards too much.

Teaching Journal: Documentum Training (2nd Attempt)

2008-11-19T18:15:07Z

I am scheduled to do some more Documentum Web Publisher training in a few minutes. This will be my second attempt at doing so this semester.

Fortunately, the difficulties that we encountered last time appear to have been resolved. I came into the classroom earlier today to make sure that all of the machines would allow me to edit a web page. Since the last training session, we've experienced one significant technical glitch that has prevented people all over campus (including myself) from editing web pages. Fortunately, there is a really simple workaround, but it does require that the user have administrator rights on a machine. You simply have to delete a file that is put into the Documents and Settings root folder on a machine. After that, Documentum Web Publisher allows you to edit web pages. I've been told by our web support administrators that Documentum will be sending us a permanent fix for this problem in the very near future, but not soon enough for my class. So I went to every machine in the classroom and deleted the file in order to get the web page editor to work.

Another wrinkle I encountered while removing the problematic file was that all of the machines needed to have Windows updates applied to them. Our network is set up so that a series of Windows patches are released across campus every month. The machines receive those patches and then reboot themselves at or around 3 p.m. the next day. This can cause a problem when you are trying to teach a class using computers and all of the machines insist on rebooting themselves in the middle of class [users with "admin" privileges can opt to reboot at a later time, but general users are forced to reboot]. Fortunately, I was able to apply the patches to most of the machines and reboot them this morning, so we hopefully will not have that problem this afternoon.

In order to help reduce the amount of clutter on the training web site I requested that all of the content be removed with a very few exceptions. This way the students will have a "clean" environment they can use for uploading content to the training web pages.

Finally, I created a sample web page for them to use. We will hopefully be able to all download content from this web page and recreate the web page within the training environment. I strongly suspect I will see minor (and possibly major) variations of the sample web page, but it will be enough to get them started. The sample web page I will be using will require them to upload a PowerPoint presentation, upload one or more images, create lists, create links to absolute and relative pages/documents, show a pullout, and use a sidebar.

Strategies for Encouraging and Increasing Class Attendance

2008-11-18T15:27:27Z

Last week, members of Educational Technology here on campus attended the Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference at UMSL, sponsored by their Center for Teaching and Learning.

One of the sessions I attended was on Strategies for Encouraging and Increasing Class Attendance. I thought this would be a good session to attend for someone who is still very new to instruction. I've been directly involved with technology training (e.g. Documentum Web Publisher, Voice-over IP), but I've never really had to deal with college students who often don't show up for class (I am as guilty of that as anyone).

The stated objectives of the presentation were as follows:

Review why attendance is important
Present overview of instructional methods
Discuss strategies for deep learning
Share ideas with a partner

For the first part of the discussion, we actually engaged in one of the learning strategies discussed by one of the plenary speakers, Dr. Allison Morrison-Shetlar. The presenters asked us to come up with two or three reasons why we think attendance is important, write them down on a 5 x 7 note card and then share those reasons with someone else in our vicinity. This is exactly identical to the "one minute paper" Dr. Morrison-Shetlar talked about in her presentation. Once we did that, we were then asked to share our different reasons with the larger group.

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Force students to engage each other face-to-face instead of through a more impartial and anonymous interface like email or a discussion board.
Discussion happens in class that expands on the material.
Keep students on track with what is going on in the course.
Important for interacting with class members.
Able to add tactile learning exercises in class.
Maintain continuity of learning -- students who miss class miss the opportunity to help connect the dots throughout the course.

The overall consensus in the room was that attendance is important for class. I've never taken a course that has said that attendance was "optional". Most courses I've taken have included the option for the instructor to drop a student from a class based on lack of attendance.

The instructional models we reviewed in this session break down into two basic categories: Instructor-centered and student-centered. Instructor-centered models include direct instruction, presentation, and "concept teaching". Direct instruction is perhaps the most traditional model in that it involves the instructor standing up at the chalkboard (or whiteboard, if we want to modernize it a bit) and delivering the content directly to the students. Presentation instructional model usually involves technology such as PowerPoint to deliver the content. However, instructors can also use web browsers and other software to deliver content. One of the nice things about the presentation model is that the instructor does not have to spend time in class writing the content out on the board. The "concept teaching" model focuses on what will help the students understand the concept. This can involve some sort of visual aid or another analog that will make the concept more meaningful to the students.

For the most part, the instructor-centered models of instruction are designed to require student attendance. Students who fail to attend class will not receive any of the benefits of the instructor-centered models of instruction. Thanks to modern technology, however, there are now tools available to provide the same models of instructor-centered teaching to distance students and asynchronous students. Tools such as Wimba and Webex enable instructors to deliver direct instruction through the web. Furthermore, they can capture and archive their lectures for later access by students. The presentation model also works well in this environment.

Learner-centered models of instruction focus on classroom discussion, cooperative learning, and problem-based instruction. All of these activities seem to require mandatory physical attendance at first glance. Thanks again to modern technology it is possible to deliver this model of instruction through the Internet. What is key for these types of activities is to be able to monitor student participation in the activity.

The presenters for this session have come up with a number of different strategies that can be used to help increase deep learning in students and encourage them to participate more fully in the learning process for their classes.

Dr. Ann Steffen teaches psychology at UMSL and has come with the following strategies:

She uses narrated PowerPoint slides for her lectures. Students can access the slides outside of class and still capture the essence of her lectures due to her narration.
Students are required to take randomized quizzes. Out of a pool of twenty questions, students may be given ten of those questions. Since the students have no idea what the actual set of questions is, it is more difficult to cheat. However, students are able to use their class notes and other information to complete the quizzes. Quizzes are timed, though, so that limits their ability to scan through their notes to find the information needed to complete the quiz.
Students only meet once a week (75 minutes) instead of twice a week because Dr. Steffen teaches a hybrid course. The rest of the course is conducted online through Blackboard (UMSL's standard course management system).
Participation in discussion forums is worth 25% of the grade. Students who don't contribute anything meaningful to the discussion won't get the points they need to get an A or even a B.
Dr. Steffen gives the students the opportunity to submit their own multiple choice questions. If a student-submitted question shows up on a future test or quiz, that student receives bonus points.

Cheryl Biehlema is a Teaching and Learning instructor at UMSL and has compiled some of her own strategies to encourage attendance and participation in class:

Peer assessments - students conduct peer assessment of their fellow students when involved in group projects. Students who receive "0" points towards their contribution to a project will have their points distributed among the contributing students.
Questions are posed to ask "why" instead of "what".
Students are asked to write for 2 minutes before responding -- this is similar to the "one minute paper" strategy except that students are not necessarily required to share their answer with a nearby classmate before sharing their response to the larger group.
Students are encouraged to answer one question per class.
Pick the "best" answer from a set of submitted responses and have the student who submitted it to defend it in class. Some students may not be comfortable with this (they may perceive it as an "attack"), so it might be wise to exercise caution when trying out this technique.
Use case studies to promote analysis, problem solving, and evaluation on defending a position. I am currently grading papers for a technical communication class that uses a lot of case studies. Unfortunately, the students in the class don't really do as much with the case studies as I might like.
Describe course concepts in metaphors -- e.g. "How is learning like an ocean?" This may not work for every class.

All of the presenters gave some good insights into what techniques can be used to stimulate discussion, encourage participation, and increase attendance. A lot of students nowadays tend to see "traditional" attendance as somewhat unnecessary because they are accustomed to learning things online. That is how I learn a lot of stuff independently. If I generally want to know something, I'll start with Google or Wikipedia and move on from there. As for class, I am currently enrolled in one technical communication course that has a lot of online activities for us to complete. It is a very small course (only four students) designed for graduate students who will eventually be teaching technical communication. I think any or all of the techniques and strategies discussed above could easily be incorporated into a technical communication course.

FoTT -- Plenary Session: Dr. Alison Morrison-Shetlar

2008-11-17T20:20:18Z

Dr. Alison Morrison-Shetlar, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies, as well as Professor of Biology at the University of Central Florida, gave the second plenary session presentation at UMSL's Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference. Her topic of choice was Interactive Teaching Techniques With and Without Technology. She has had a long and distinguished career in both science and education. It was a very enjoyable presentation as she brings a great deal of energy and enthusiasm to her presentation.

Dr. Morrison-Shetlar's presentation is available from her web site by clicking the Handouts link. However, her web site uses "lightbox" to show her slides, so it is not practical for downloading a copy of her slides. Unlike Dr. Ray Schroeder, who was the other plenary session speaker, she has embraced PowerPoint for her presentation, though she uses it fairly effectively to make her points.

Her first technique that she shared with us was simply to greet us with "Good morning". Since our first response was too lethargic, she tried again, "GOOD MORNING!" This time we had no choice but to respond.

Her three main objectives for the presentation were:

Demonstrate strategies that work in large and small classes.
Discuss how to modify the strategies and create new ones that fit different situations and teaching personalities
Show high and low technology adaptations of strategies for engaging students.

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The nice thing about the "one minute paper" technique is that it doesn't require much preparation on the part of the instructor. The challenge is to find engaging questions for your students that not only force them to think, but also to articulate a thoughtful response. "What is 2 + 2?" is not particularly good for this type of exercise, but "Why does 2 + 2 = 4?" might be.

Another technique that can be useful is to have the students actually draw a picture, a diagram, a chart or some other visual imagery to help explain an idea, a relationship, or a process. We do this all the time when we create PowerPoint presentations, though we generally invest significant time and energy to do so. Dr. Morrison-Shetlar advocates a much more informal approach by letting the students create doodles and then explain that doodle to their classmates. This forces the "doodler" to articulate the idea expressed by the doodle and also solicit feedback on the effectiveness of the doodle in question for representing the abstract concept.

You can also simply present an image to the students and ask them questions about what the image represents. We do this a lot in technical communication because visual design is a very important component of good technical communication. One recent example of how images can be used to stimulate discussion can be found here. This link shows different images of the 2008 U.S. presidential election results. As one can see from the images, at first glance, it appears as though a majority of the states are "red", since that color dominates the map. However, if we adjust the shape of the map somewhat to reflect the population, we can see that the map is more "blue". Images are usually a direct appeal to one's emotional state (that is why advertising works). Emotions are often linked to memory since a strong emotion about something can lead to greater memory recall of a particular event. However, one has to be very careful about the way in which emotions are engaged when showing images. Some images are very emotionally charged, so may not be appropriate for classroom discussion.

Dr. Morrison-Shetlar is a strong proponent of just-in-time teaching (jitt). She sees it as a way to prepare students to come to class. It also allows the professor to determine where the class is in their understanding of a concept and make adjustments as necessary. For students, it provides a feedback loop to help students keep up with the content. Just-in-time teaching is used on our campus in clicker-enabled classes. Some instructors can also use Blackboard to help facilitate just-in-time teaching by posting assigned readings shortly before class and through the interactive quiz/survey features in Blackboard. This keeps the students on their toes before class.

The main advantages to jitt are as follows: it helps students develop problem solving skills and concept understanding. Students gain some control over their own learning process--they can go along with jitt or use their own style, if they like. Depending on the jitt exercises, it may promote team building and communication skills. Finally, it has the potential to reduce the mismatch between what is being taught and what students learn. A large part of the jitt process is the instructor's capability for flexibility in their pedagogy to adapt to the students as they are learning, just as the students need to be flexible to the instructor's teaching style. Instructors should not be abruptly changing their pedagogy every day, but they can gradually introduce changes as needed, based on the instructor's perceptions of how well the students are learning the material. The goal is to create a positive feedback loop between the students and their instructor so that as the students become more proficient in their understanding of the material, the instructor can move the class forward to more advanced concepts.

As I hope you can see from my discussion of Dr. Morrison-Shetlar's presentation, I really learned a lot about pedagogy and instruction. If I were attending University of Central Florida, I would be eager to get into one of her classes, even though biology is not one of my strong suits (I did OK in freshman biology here at Missouri S&T and had a pretty good teacher, but not quite like Dr. Morrison-Shetlar).

FoTT -- Plenary Session: Ray Schroeder

2008-11-17T16:20:59Z

Ray Schroeder presented at the first of two plenary sessions we attended at the Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference in St. Louis. Dr. Schroeder is currently the Director of Technology Enhanced Learning and an Emeritus professor at University of Illinois at Springfield.

The focus of Dr. Schroeder's presentation was using "transparent" technologies to transform teaching. Dr. Schroeder defines "transparent technology" as those technologies that "do not get in the way of teaching."

Unlike most of the presenters, Dr. Schroeder used one of his many blogs as his presentation platform: Transparent Technology Transforming Teaching (this was also the title of his presentation). His unique approach has some key advantages over the more "traditional" PowerPoint presentation.

First, all of the content for his presentation is immediately accessible simply by scrolling down the page. You don't need to scroll through innumerable slides--each of which might have its own unique animation or other content that interferes with your navigation. This makes it very easy to "browse" his presentation, like any other blog out there.

Second, the use of a blog for the presentation allows for a certain degree of feedback from visitors. If a blog is to be used as part of a course (instead of a presentation), the instructor can set up rules for commenting on their blog that allow only registered individuals the ability to comment--this is determined by the blog engine used and by the instructor's own policies. He (or she) will need to require students to register for the blog so they can post comments. Again, this feature allows visitors to the blog to browse the different entries and provide feedback on particularly interesting ones.

Third, blogs allow for easier hyperlinking than PowerPoint. Because the blog is delivered through a browser, clicking on a link will take you to a new web page without having to open a separate application to do so. "Tabbed" browsing in Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari or another web browser also allows you to navigate to hyperlinks contained in the blog without ever having to close the blog or navigate away from it. This is definitely superior to PowerPoint navigation of hyperlinks.

Finally, presenting content in a blog means you can arrange your content in sequence chronologically or by category. This means that visitors can access content of a particular interest (e.g. the blog you are reading has a "Blackboard" category because we support a number of Blackboard issues). They can also see content unfolded over time, which may be extremely relevant in time-sensitive courses (e.g. political science, technology development).

Oh, one more thing. Because of the way blogs are built, they can easily contain other Web 2.0 technologies such as YouTube flash videos, quick online surveys, "liveblogging" applications, and much, much more. PowerPoint has none of these features.

One of the downsides to creating a blog for presentations is the fact that as an instructor, you will need to take the time to sit down and figure out how your presentation of content will be structured to take into account the many new ways in which a blog can be used to deliver content. Blogs are extremely flexible, however, and very easy to set up. Dr. Schroeder's blog for his presentation was created using Blogspot (powered by Blogger). It is a very simple blog, but still contains a wide variety of different content. If Dr. Schroeder was so inclined, he could add some customized features to his blog to make it more his own or he could move his blog to a different blog engine (e.g. Movable Type).

Dr. Schroeder's presentation was a very different experience than most presentations I've sat through and gave me quite a bit to think about with regard to developing my own pedagogical style of instruction.

Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference -- UMSL

2008-11-17T16:12:35Z

Just this past week, EdTech took a road trip to St. Louis to attend the Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference at UMSL, sponsored by their Center for Teaching and Learning (analogous to our CERTI, I believe).

This conference is very similar in nature and scope to the Teaching and Learning Technology Conference that we held on this campus this past spring. We will be holding the next TLT Conference on April 9-10, 2009.

I did not get the opportunity to attend every session I might have liked to, but I did get to see both plenary speakers and also attend a couple of interesting sessions. I will be posting on each of those sessions/speakers in future posts so stay tuned.

We (EdTech) also had the opportunity to meet with our counterparts at UMSL and also have a meeting of the BbIC, which is the intercampus collaboration of Blackboard support folks from all four campuses. Although we routinely interact with each other via email and other communication tools, it is always nice to actually sit down face-to-face and spend time with them. It is also an opportunity to get outside of our campus and see what other folks are doing on their campuses.

"Andragogy" v. "Pedagogy"

2008-11-05T18:33:04Z

Angie Hammons shares her thoughts on an article she found in Campus Technology:

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[ANGIE] I read an interesting article the other day in Campus Technology (http://campustechnology.com/articles/68283_1/). It was titled "The Institutional Path for Change in this Age: Andragogy, not Pedagogy." It solidified some thoughts in my mind about the educational process. The article begins by explaining the difference in pedagogy and andragogy. Pedagogy was something I focused on with my educational courses in college. It focuses on transmitting information to students through curriculum. This was truly the first time I had been introduced to the term andragogy, which is the acquisition of content. The article goes on to list the five principles of andragogy:

Letting learners know why something is important to learn.
Showing learners how to direct themselves through information
Relating the topic to the learners' experiences
People will not learn until they are ready and motivated to learn
Requires helping them overcome inhibitions, behaviors and beliefs about learning.

This was truly an eye-opening description as it mirrors my philosophy on education. I had learned how to be the "sage on the stage" while at university. But I found in the classroom it wasn't the best method for students to learn. Sure they could memorize and repeat for a test. But how much of that information were they retaining for use later? I didn't see the "Aha" that I wanted to see. Then I began to focus on the Constructivist Theory of Learning, which simply states that students needed to construct their own learning for it to become meaningful. This was my "Aha" moment and truly began to change the way I viewed education. When put in to practice, I soon began to see students understanding concepts that I had struggled with them to understand. They were putting together complex processes and it was making sense to them. Now, I also realize that this doesn't work for everything. I do however believe that it can improve the outcome for students. This article simply reinforces what I have seen in my own classroom.

With the advent of technology andragogy becomes easier to assess and collect evidence on what students are doing and learning. As the article states, "We are now in the era when student learning experiences can be visible because of the everywhere and all-the-time (ubiquitous and universal) presence of Web connections." Students connect beyond the classroom with their peers. It is important that we recognize this and utilize this in our approach to teach. Technology can become a powerful tool when utilized effectively within andragogy.

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[MALCOLM] For the most part, I agree with Angie's interpretation of learning using the andragogical model instead of the more traditional pedagogical model. However, I am not as supportive as Angie is of the Constructivist Theory of Learning. Mainly because it is often used to teach subjects such as mathematics and science which do not lend themselves as much to the Constructivist Theory. The most brilliant minds on the planet have developed mathematical theorems and scientific models to describe reality over the past 500 years (and longer). Unfortunately, there is a tendency for teachers--particular in the lower grades--to encourage students to "independently" discover foundational mathematical principles. Students (and often teachers) simply don't have the rigorous training in logic required to perform the necessary thought experiments to discover those principles on their own. In many cases, this lack of rigor in student thinking processes can lead to fundamental errors in how they approach problems (such as forgetting that some mathematical formulas will only work under certain constraints--e.g. the Quadratic Formula only works when a is not equal to 0).

Scoff if you like, but the fact that someone actually discovered the Quadratic Formula is really quite an amazing achievement. Higher up the scale of intellectual achievements, it is simply a miracle that calculus was developed to the point that we can use it to observe more about the world around us today than at any other time in human history. We can also use it to create astounding technology sufficiently advanced that it is, in Arthur C. Clarke's words, "indistinguishable from magic."

With that said, I do believe it is possible to use a guided constructivist approach when teaching subjects that are less constrained by the rules of reality (the key word here is "guided"). For instance, technical communication is one area that can benefit students a great deal when they are allowed to experiment and test knowledge in a "safe" environment. Students can build presentations, write proposals, and perform other tasks that incorporate "best practices" of technical communication in an environment that is mostly free from any real-world consequences other than a grade. They can also use peer-review with their fellow classmates to check for the usability of the documentation they create under the watchful eyes of the instructor.

One of the challenges I have to face as a potential instructor in technical communication (I am a graduate student of Tech Com) is to somehow relate the content of the course to real-world situations. Often the only way to do this is to engage in "pseudotransactional" activities that simulate the types of documents students will need to create when they are actually employed for a company or other institution. Fortunately, there are any number of examples of "bad" technical communication to illustrate to students just how NOT to do something (especially bad PowerPoint presentations).

EdTech goes to Educause 2008 in Orlando, Florida

2008-11-05T15:05:30Z

Angie Hammons and Lauren Oswald, members of the EdTech group here on campus, recently had the opportunity to do a poster presentation at Educause 2008, which took place in Orlando, Florida, Oct 28 - 31.

Here is what Angie experienced:
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I had the privilege of being accepted to present a poster session at Educause 2008 in Orlando with Lauren Oswald. I have presented at multiple conferences all over the United States but wasn't prepared for what Educause was truly like. To give you a little idea of what the conference was like, there were over 8000 attendees from around the world. The theme this year was "Interactions, Ideas and Inspiration." It was incredibly exciting to share with individuals what we are working on here on campus and know that we have many interested in coming to visit with us to see what we have been doing. It was a great conference to connect with other professionals involved in higher education. It was a great opportunity for me to explore the issues surrounding pedagogy that got me into education originally. So often, I focus on the technology but truly enjoyed this opportunity to explore how we use technology in the classroom and how it can truly impact the education process. The integration of technology into any classroom should not be about having a shiny new toy. It truly should be about providing new tools that enhance the learning process. It is incredibly important that the addition of technology to a course should be carefully planned out and designed.

The poster session was scheduled for late Thursday afternoon, so I was expecting a lot of people to not be interested in coming. Boy was I ever wrong. There was an incredible amount of people who descended on the presentations. For the entire hour and fifteen minutes, we didn't quit talking and sharing how we have been transforming informal learning spaces on campus. I had the opportunity to connect with many universities around our state as well as around the world. Informal learning spaces have become an important topic in higher education.

Where does learning take place?

This was a question that began the process of examining the learning spaces on campus. Learning takes place anywhere and everywhere in our society today. Classrooms are no longer the only place on campus that learning takes place. Learning now takes place wherever the learner is inspired. "All learning takes place in a physical environment with quantifiable and perceptible physical characteristics." - Graetz, Ken "The Psychology of Learning Environments", Learning Spaces, Educause 2006, http://www.educause.edu/LearningSpaces/10569

How do universities and colleges transition their traditional spaces to accommodate the needs of an ever-changing student population?

If learning takes place anywhere, how do we as universities plan spaces or vignettes that support a process that is ever changing? "Learning is the central activity of colleges and universities. Sometimes that learning occurs in classrooms (formal learning); other times it results from serendipitous interactions among individuals (informal learning). Space - whether physical or virtual - can have an impact on learning. It can bring people together; it can encourage exploration, collaboration, and discussion. Or, space can carry an unspoken message of silence and disconnectedness. More and more we see the power of built pedagogy (the ability of space to define how one teaches) in colleges and universities" - Oblinger, Diana, "Space as a Change Agent", Learning Spaces, Educause 2006, http://www.educause.edu/LearningSpaces/10569

Our goal was to define a process that could be repeatable on our campus and others. We have begun the process to standardize how we design these spaces. It is the design process that can be repeated. You can't have cookie-cutter rooms where all informal spaces are the same. They must truly be tailored for the students and the discipline that will utilize that space the most. We are continuing to develop this process and will be excited to share it in the January issue of Educause Quarterly.

Teaching Journal: English 160 (After Third Attempt)

2008-10-28T13:41:10Z

Last Thursday, I taught a section of English 160 as part of the teaching requirement for Tech Com 404 (Teaching Technical Communiaction). This was quite different from the previoius teaching sessions I conducted for the course. In the previous teaching attempts, I had the students participate in some group activities that were provided by Dr. Northcut.

In this teaching attempt (yes, I call them teaching attempts because I really have no effective means of gauging if the students have learned the material), I actually delivered content to the students. That day we discussed recommendation reports. Dr. Northcut again provided me with the content for the course. However, I wasn't very keen on the color scheme she selected for her slides, so I "dressed them up" a little using Missouri S&T English 160 template that I put together. It worked quite well. I also added a moderate level of sophisticated animation so that the point that I was talking about would stand out from the preceding points (it's not hard to set this up in PowerPoint--it usually takes less than a minute per slide, depending on how complicated you decide to make the slide).

I also wanted to have some "insurance" against any technical difficulties that might occur with the campus network, so I brought my own laptop and projector to class. As it happened, this turned out quite well because I used the laptop/projector for presenting the content for the course and I used the in-class computer/Smartboard to access Blackboard and show students where the presentation was as well as to bring up the quotes Dr. Northcut recommended I use from her first day of class. This way I could have multiple displays going doing different things and presenting different content. I thought it worked out well (especially since the network behaved itself).

As I went through the presentation, I made continual reference to the textbook for the class, emphasizing that all of the material about recommendation reports is contained therein. I also hammered on the point that they need to work on effective design (chapter 11) as well as the revision process (chapter 8).

All in all, the entire class went pretty well. Unfortunately, I still can't get them to talk much. This may be the hardest part of teaching is to bring students out of their self-imposed cocoons and actually have a voice in the class. I can't say that I would be any different in their place, though.

Teaching Journal: English 160 (Third Attempt)

2008-10-23T17:34:13Z

Today I am scheduled to teach English 160 for the third time this semester. Unlike the previous two times (see here and here), I will actually be presenting lecture material to the class on Recommendation Reports.

Due to the technical difficulties I experienced last week (there were campus-wide issues with network file storage, preventing people from logging into CLC machines), I decided to bring along some "insurance". My presentation is currently housed on a tablet PC that I can log into locally if necessary. Furthermore, instead of the Smartboard in the classroom, I am using a projector that I brought from our office in conjunction with a Targus presenter device that allows me to walk around the room and still advance the slides remotely (I love this device!). I did have to shove the Smartboard out of the way of the projection screen. EdTech really needs to upgrade this room, but the funds for the room are provided by a department and the room is not centrally scheduled, to EdTech doesn't have much say about what equipment is housed here (it's provided through some grant funding, I believe).

I plan on having Blackboard available on the Smartboard if I want to show the students some quotations from a presentation earlier in the semester (their first day, in fact). I also want to show them where they can find the presentation to review the content, if they desire (I doubt they will, but I like to give them that option).

Dr. Northcut, the regular instructor for the class was kind enough to provide me with the basic slides for the class. However, I didn't much care for her choice of background color (light purple is just not my color), so I "dressed up" the slides a bit with a Missouri S&T template. Dr. Northcut is more than welcome to use that template for future presentations, of course.

I also added some complexity to the slide transitions to highlight certain aspects of the content.

We shall see how it goes today. More later (after class).

Teaching Journal: After Teaching English 160 (2nd attempt)

2008-10-16T20:32:51Z

Today, I taught a section of English 160 on behalf of Dr. Northcut, the regular instructor. The topic of the day was progress reports, which all of the students have to create for their semester-long project. Dr. Northcut supplied some sample progress reports and a grading rubric.

My original goal was to have the students access the sample progress reports through Blackboard, then, in groups, write a memo analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of one of the reports. I had hoped that I could somehow get them to articulate their thoughts more effectively by forcing them to write collaborative. A noble goal, to be sure. I created a folder in Blackboard to house the sample progress reports and included an extra bonus of an online conversation I recently had with a computer science professor. It was another example of an informal progress report.

This all sounds like a good plan, right? Well, like any good plan, it fell apart as soon as I had to actually rely on the technology. We have had an extensive outage of the network file storage system on campus. The end result is that students can't properly login to campus machines (mostly CLC systems--which is what CSF 114 is equipped with). I called in the EdTech technical support guru for assistance. He logged me into the instructor station as an Admin. From there, I could access Blackboard and access the files I needed for class.

I printed out enough copies of each of the files so every student had 1 copy of each file. They also had a copy of Dr. Northcut's grading rubric. Since the students were having extreme difficulty accessing the machines, I decided to simply have them collaborate together to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the different progress reports. They could then present to the class their findings, using the copy I had on Blackboard as a visual aid, if necessary.

Overall, that seemed to work. The students had a good understanding of what the "best" progress report looked like (it's pretty easy to tell, really). I just wish the network had been available so they could actually write a memo summarizing their findings and sending it as an attachment via email. This would more accurately reflect the transactional writing they will encounter in the work place. I added the email exchange between myself and a faculty member specifically to demonstrate a real-world example of an informal progress report.

All in all, it didn't go too badly, but not as well as I might have hoped.

Moral of the story: Technology will ALWAYS be unavailable when you need it most.

Teaching Journal: Documentum Training (After)

2008-10-16T20:16:21Z

Yesterday I conducted Documentum Web Publisher training for a group of students. Four of the students were part of a project within the Information Systems & Technology department, tasked with creating an EcoCAR Challenge web site. This is an effort involving Missouri S&T and several other higher-education institutions to create the best, most ecologically friendly car (similar to the biannual solar car challenge, I suppose). The remaining student is working for the Civil, Architectural, & Environmental Engineering department.

It's been awhile since I've taught Documentum. In the past, I've mostly had to deal with administrative support staff and a few faculty. This was the first time that I've had to teach a group of students. To make things just a little more interesting, I was the only native-speaker of English in the room. Everyone else was from India (I think--one of them might have been from Sri Lanka or a related nation in the same general geographic location).

At first, everything seemed to go pretty well. Some of the students arrived late, so I had to backtrack a little bit to get them caught up to the two students who were on time. I explained how the interface worked and what we would be doing during the class. Since time was limited, I really just focussed on the following:

Upload an image.
Upload a document.
Create a web page.
Web page should have the following features: external link, relative link to another page within the site, bookmark link to location on the same web page, at least one image, and at least one link to a document.

Unfortunately, when we finally got to the point of creating a web page, we ran into some technical difficulties. For whatever reason, Documentum was giving us some strange error messages when we tried to do anything. I didn't have any difficulties on the instructor stations, but the students certainly did. I managed to get a hold of the web development support team. They all came over to investigate what was happening to the machines. Apparently, the Java Runtime Environment required to use the Documentum web page editor was experiencing some sort of conflict with another component that had mistakenly been installed on those machines.

We did manage to get a web page created for everyone in the room. All of the students were able to access their web pages through a web browser to see what they had done.

Even on the best of days, Documentum can cause issues and frustration. It is even worse when you are trying to teach it to someone else who has never seen it before, especially when the technology refuses to cooperate.

A Study in the Use of Clickers in the Classroom by Dr. Woelk

2008-10-14T14:20:30Z

Dr. Klaus Woelk, Associate Professor of Chemistry, recently had an article published in the Journal of Chemical Education titled "Optimizing the Use of Personal Response Devices (Clickers) in Large-Enrollment Introductory Courses". Among other things, Dr. Woelk is very active in teaching students introductory chemistry at Missouri S&T. He has soundly embraced the technology of clickers to help improve the learning outcomes of students.

While Dr. Woelk maintains his focus on using clickers for teaching chemistry, he also readily acknowledges and even promotes the fact that clickers can be a very powerful tool in introductory courses for other disciplines such as mathematics and engineering. Basically, clicker activities can be broken down into two categories: "I am" and "I do". Dr. Woelk expands each of these two categories into subcategories that involve different types of learning for different activities. For instance, "I am" clicker activities revolve around the student's active participation in the lecture. Thanks to clickers, the instructor can get near-instantaneous attendance results. Instructors can also use clickers to identify how many of the students have been keeping up with assigned reading (and track which students are not keeping up using the clicker system's reporting tools).

"I do" clicker activities are tied to the student's understanding of the concepts, specifically learning, understanding and applying the material. Instructors can pose questions that rely on students understanding the fundamental principles of their discipline in order to succeed. Students can also be forced to defend and articulate their responses to clicker questions.

Dr. Woelk admits that getting students interested and involved in the learning process can be very challenging for instructors. Clickers is one way in which instructors can motivate students to learn.

Here is the bibliographic information for Dr. Woelk's article, for reference (ACS/Journal of Chemical Education style):

Woelk, K. Journal of Chemical Education. 2008, 85, 1400-1405.

Teaching Journal: Documentum Training

2008-10-14T13:20:26Z

On Wednesday, October 15, 2008, I am scheduled to conduct Documentum Web Publisher (DWP) training for a very small group of students. Presumably, they are working for academic/administrative departments on campus and need to use Documentum to update web pages.

I have conducted this type of training in the past and so I am pretty familiar with the environment I will be working in. I used to do training in Engineering Management Room 235, but the IT Training group has moved their trainings to Library 103, which is a room designated specifically for training purposes. One of the major advantages to using that room is that the software installed on those machines does not change as rapidly as it may for a typical CLC room (like Eman 235). Also, it can be much easier to get into the Library 103 room simply because there are very few groups competing for that resource.

Since I will be training students instead of staff, I do not anticipate too many problems. Students seem to have a much better grasp of the technology than staff members in a lot of ways. I don't mean that staff members are computer illiterate, only that many of them have had relatively little exposure to some of the technolgy that DWP incorporates. Within a limited time span, it can be a challenge to make sure everyone is keeping up with me. DWP doesn't help itself by being somewhat finicky. I've seen it work on one system, and not on another, even when both systems presumably have identical software builds (we use ghost-casting to clone system builds, among other things--this allows for all machines in a room to have the exact same build in a relatively small time frame).

DWP can be very frustrating to work with. My goal for the training session is to help the students understand some of the "why's" of the software. I also hope to give them a better understanding of the technical communication principles behind effective web design. DWP doesn't support everything that students or departments would like to do on the web (we've encountered significant difficulties in embedding flash video), so I would like to help steer the students clear of the potential pitfalls inherent in DWP.

MITC 2008 -- Challenges of Creating Online Content

2008-10-08T13:49:23Z

Challenges of Creating Online Content (PPT 2007)

On October 6-7, 2008, I attended the Morenet Instructional Technology Conference 2008 (MITC). It was an interesting conference focusing on the ways technology is used to enhance learning outcomes in the classrooms. The primary focus seemed to be on K-12 instruction, but there were a number of higher ed folks there as well.

How did we find out about this conference? Well, back in the spring, EdTech attended the Morenet HELIX/CONNECTIONS Conference, which is basically the spring version of what we attended earlier this week. However, HELIX has a broader focus on other areas related to Information Technology such as security, servers, networking, and so forth. MITC was only focused on instructional/educational technology. Morenet began advertising MITC shortly after we attended HELIX, and Meg, our director of EdTech, suggested that I submit a proposal to present at MITC.

After giving it some thought, I decided that I am reasonably knowledgeable about web content (it's my job to create it, after all), so I figured that I could provide other folks who are curious--or intimidated--by the challenges inherent in creating web-based content. My goal was to guide newer web-developers to think about creating web content in a different way than they may have been exposed to already. I sent my submission into Morenet for review, and--to my surprise, terror, and Meg's delight--they actually accepted. Furthermore, they decided that my chosen topic, "Challenges of Creating Online Content", was expansive enough to devote over 2 full hours to. That's right, they gave me a 2-hour block of time to discuss these challenges. As it turned out, that was just enough time to get through the presentation, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

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When I attended the conference, I had the luxury of presenting my conference on the last day in the last slot (Tuesday, October 7, from 8:45 - 11 a.m.). I found this to be very useful because I could adjust my approach to my presentation based on my observations and interactions with other conference attendees. I had ample opportunity to conduct audience analysis. I also had the luxury of making some last-minute adjustments to my presentation. I added a few more visuals to my slides to help enhance some of the content and demonstrate the principles/technology under discussion.

My presentation essentially covered four things:

My background qualifications (Education and Experience)
Joys of Technical Communication
Challenges
Tools of the Trade

I felt is was important to cover my education and experience to a certain degree simply because the people in my audience had no idea who I was or where I came from. I just simply showed up to give a presentation on web-content. I did, in fact, have a reasonably full audience, so we had a very good discussion in all. I talked about my education in English literature with a minor in technical writing (and pseudo-minors in mathematics and physics--I have all the credits for an actual minor, but never filled out the requisite paperwork).
I also informed them about my current pursuit of an M.S. in Technical Communication (about 50% complete after this semester).

As far as experience goes, I have been doing web content development for over 8 years (closer to 10, but who's counting?). One of my earliest projects was the BrainTrax web site I developed to cover algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. It was a huge project that really demanded a lot with regards to web-based content. I had to fit several different technologies together into a coherent and functional whole that was available across multiple browsers and multiple platforms. This challenge was significantly enhanced by the fact that the stuff we were using was still fairly brand new. As far as I have been able to determine, no one else has yet duplicated our approach to the BrainTrax content. Either that is because our approach is worthless (we have several testimonials from reputable folks that indicate otherwise) or because no one has yet made the cognitive connections to our pedagogical/technological methodology. Unfortunately, the project has been put "on hold" until our campus can figure out if it is worth pursuing more fully.

I also talked about my experience developing the EdTech web site and this blog web site for Educational Technology @ Missouri S&T. The EdTech web site serves a very different audience than the BrainTrax web site and also has a very different purpose. BrainTrax is more about providing conceptual information on mathematics. EdTech is more about providing functional "how-to" information on the different technologies we use and support on our campus.

Once we got into the actual "meat" of the presentation, the audience discussion definitely became more engaging. My hope was to shed some enlightenment not only on specific technologies used for web-content development (e.g. Dreamweaver), but also on some foundational technical communication principles that can be applied across multiple, indeed any, web-content development technologies.

Audience and purpose have been hammered into me over time by every single instructor I have had in technical writing or technical communication (yes, there is a difference). I tried to hammer those same concepts into my audience, though in a pleasant and hopefully memorable way. I also included organization as the third key technical communication principle after audience and purpose. When designing a web-space, organization is absolutely critical. It is important for information to be easily navigable (addressing the audience's need for convenience), but also scalable, so that the web site can grow over time in a manageable way. Creating a web-space can be a very organic experience, much like growing plants. However, dedicated plant growers can guide the growth of their plants in ways that can enhance their gardens. Web content developers can also guide the growth of their web sites to enhance the overall site to be appropriate for multiple audiences who each have different, sometimes even competing, purposes for visiting the site and always need a convenient way to access the information contained in the web site. Data is absolutely useless without some frame of reference to turn that data into meaningful information that can be acted on or responded to.

I think the audience actually responded well to what I was trying to teach them. It was certainly a different approach to web content than many of the audience members had been exposed to. Audience and purpose are so critical to understanding technical communication that I kept coming back to them in other contexts when I was responding to questions later in the presentation. I told them if they remember nothing else about my presentation, they should remember AUDIENCE and PURPOSE.

I then discussed issues that I've encountered when dealing with different web page editors. I gave a representative sample of web page editors that I have used in the past--Word, PowerPoint (yes, it creates web pages), Dreamweaver, Documentum, and Note/Word/TextPad text-based editors. This really sparked some discussion because many folks in the audience have used either these specific editors or other freeware editors they have found around the Internet. I still think Word is a fantastic web-page creation tool even though it creates very bloated code. If time is of the essence and formatting needs to be just right, Word is a very efficient and quick way to go. PowerPoint can be useful, but there are considerable impacts to the final product when saving a PowerPoint file as a web page. Dreamweaver is very good and quite popular, though somewhat expensive to obtain (price is always a significant consideration for K-12 schools that have limited resources). Documentum is not widely used in education, but I included it as an example of an institution-wide implementation of web-design that can make it easy to create web pages in one respect, but also imposes a number of constraints on web content authors (difficult to include dynamic, multimedia content in Documentum).

We also had a lively discussion about images--which to use, which not to use, and why. As with web page editors, there are some cost considerations when deciding which product is best. Adobe has Photoshop, Illustrator, and (now) Fireworks, which are now packaged as part of Adobe Creative Suite, an extremely expensive product. It is also a very broad suite of products that really get a web content developer going. There is, however, a fairly steep learning curve for some Adobe products. One image editor I really like is Paint Shop Pro. It can do almost everything Adobe products can do for much, much less money (less than $100). And there are always freeware image editors like GIMP. I am always a bit skeptical of freeware simply because they tend to lack well-developed user documentation. It makes finding the answer to a problem difficult.

One other major challenge involved with images has to do with resizing them. Although it seems fairly trivial, there are a few layers of complexity involved. For one, it is always better to go from a higher resolution image to a lower resolution image. High to low means that you can get better mileage from a single image. For instance, a high resolution photograph can often be used for multiple media such as flyers, brochures, web sites, manuals, web-based applications, and more. As a matter of fact, my boss, Meg Brady, was the one who raised this issue in the first place at the conference, so I found it extremely helpful to latch onto her comments.

After the Images section, I talked a bit about PDF documents and Flash video. I love PDF documents. They are versatile, portable, generally small, open quickly, and can be used over and over again in a variety of different ways. One of the key ways I use them for EdTech is to create a printable form of user documentation developed for Blackboard and other services that we support. Documentum Web Publisher is configured to create very usable printable documents, but I wanted to add my own twist to them, which meant I had to use PDF. Several folks in the audience had a lively discussion about different PDF creation tools, especially free ones. One important change that Microsoft made in Office 2007 is the ability to save directly to PDF (lacking in previous versions of Office). This means users don't need to have special software installed to create PDFs. Of course, you still need a PDF reader to view them, but Acrobat Reader is readily available for download.

Flash video is still somewhat new to me, though it is widely used on a number of different web sites that support multimedia (e.g. YouTube). One of our biggest challenges here on campus is trying to integrate Camtasia-produced video tutorials into our EdTech web site. Documentum doesn't support flash video very well (or the Admins don't let us use it--you can't embed a YouTube video in a Documentum page, for example).

Towards the end of my presentation, I talked about Web 2.0 technologies that are currently being used in the classroom. Having already attended several presentations about Web 2.0 technology on Monday, it was easy to discuss. Most of the attendees had also been to those same presentations, so I could refer to them for some good examples of how they are being used. Specific Web 2.0 technologies that I mentioned were blogs (like this one), wikis, and podcasts. I haven't created podcasts yet, mostly because I don't hearing a recording of my voice. It just sounds "off" to me.

Finally, I informed the audience of the tools that I specifically used in order to do my job for web content creation--both hardware and software. It is always very useful to have good tools available, so state-of-the-art hardware is always desired. I managed to finagle a decent machine for my own use on campus through our Desktop Enhancement program, with a few minor upgrades above our standard Power User machine. Working for IT definitely has some perks. Working for EdTech means we get to play with cool toys (even if we don't always get to keep them).

All in all, it was a very good experience. One member of the audience whispered to my boss sitting next to her that this was exactly what she was looking for. She wanted something that was not too technical and could give her an idea of where to start. Others in the audience had more experience in web development, but even they seemed to get something useful to take with them from our presentation.

I think this presentation is something that I can use again and again in front of different audiences, tweaking it from time to time to incorporate new baseline technologies as they become available and widely adopted.