Monthly Archives: June 2008

Natural Dyes with the Cleveland Museum of Art

IVC Showcases have been going on all day today at NECC 2008 and they’ve been mostly packed! I couldn’t get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame one, so you can get a flavor of the popularity of the IVC sessions at NECC this year. Why are they just on one day?

In The Cleveland Museum of Art‘s program, we participated in their new program on Natural Dyes. The participants colored a bookmark using spinach, just like we did in Jazz two weeks ago. I’ll add a couple pictures here from the Jazz workshop so you can see what it’s like:

Here’s a new thing! Someone asked how to get access to the programming if they don’t have access and CMA answered that they’ve done their programs with tools such as Skype etc. So they are willing to work with you on getting access to their programs. Cool!

NECC Tip: Show Up Early!

Well this morning I thought I’d run over and blog the presentation by the Learn2.ca crew from Canada, but the session was full! It seems if you want to get to a BYOL session (or even the others), you have to hurry up and get there early!

Anyway, take some time to check out the Learn2 website to see the online tools they have for collaborative projects.

The International Teddy Bear Writing Project

Sunday night during the global poster gallery at NECC, I thought I’d interview the presenters and post the interview online. Yes, I asked them for permission!

The presenters were Cathy Timpone, Park Ridge Public Schools with Agnes Zaorski.

The Teddy Bear project is described online, and this Moodle site is used to support the project.

If the YouTube video below doesn’t load, try it from TeacherTube.

Is it just my computer or my hotel Internet connection or did YouTube pull a lot of frames out of this video? This is my first try with this idea and I may need to tweak the process a bit.

Collaborative Groups for Projects and PD

I listened to the NECC keynote this evening on The Wisdom of Crowds thinking about those I work with collaboratively for projects and professional development.

So here are some scribbles:

rough quote: if you can have a group that is working well together, you can broaden the range of possibilities of what that group can achieve.

working well means that you have

  • diverse groups – not just sociological diversity; cognitive diversity – how they approach decisions and problems – add slower learners adds knowledge to the group because they have a different way of approaching the problem, which makes the group attack the problem in a different way than if everyone in the group approached it from the same perspective – they to actually be diverse in their opinions, not just assigned “devil’s advocates”
  • independence – people who will say what they really think
  • plus other things you can read about online her

Homogeneous groups – the more they talk the dumber they get. This is often called “group think.” It creates an echo chamber where everyone says the same thing. It’s harder for the group to see where they are wrong. It happens on blogs and online discussion groups.

Some questions while I listened….

  • How is this different from mob mentality? to get wisdom you need the diverse thinking and the courage to share diverse thinking
  • How is this concept based on research? it’s experiments etc. It sort of sounds like practical application of statistics and probability, but I wonder also is it just probabilities?

While I listened, I also googled “wisdom of crowds critique” and this was my favorite critique of what I skimmed….

Conclusions: interesting concept, not enough specific application to education to really hold our attention. But I realized that when I’m in groups that start heading towards group think, it’s important to get a different perspective in quick!! I can think of a few friends who are really good at bringing in that different perspective!

NECC Sunday Morning

It’s Sunday morning at NECC and I have a few little things to say before I starting blogging NECC!

Jazz
June 20 we finished up a week of the Jazz workshop. It was incredible and busy so I didn’t blog at all. It was the first international Jazz workshop with a connection to Wales all week. Yes, we did work out the time zones!! So check out these resources:

NECC
I’m presenting my all day projects workshop today and Collaborations Around the Planet tomorrow. All my handouts and resources are on the right of my blog.

My Research Survey
Another shameless beg to fill out my survey. I still need some more! If you haven’t done it yet and you coordinate VC at a school or district, please click here to read about it and then take the survey. Thank you!!!

Lit Review: The Use of Videoconferencing as a Medium for Collaboration of Experiences and Dialogue Among Graduate Students

Lit Review: This is a post in a series focusing on the research studies on videoconferencing.

Berson, M. J., Carano, K., Carlson, L. A., Mixon, N. K., Rodriguez, P., Sheffield, C. C., et al. (2006). The use of videoconferencing as a medium for collaboration of experiences and dialogue among graduate students: A case study from two southeastern universities. Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2006, 262-267.  Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/

My Codes: VCProjects

Main Point: The authors are part of a collaboration between the teacher education programs at two universities connecting via Internet2. The article describes the semester long team-teaching course, advantages and disadvantages of the team-teaching videoconference format, and discusses some of the content covered during the joint sessions. The class used blogging as an asynchronous method to connect the classes and allow for additional reflective thinking.

Theoretical Framework/References:
The article references Vygotsky to show the importance of “cultural exchange, social interaction, and peer collaboration” for the learning process.

Methods, Sample, Variables/Case:
This article is a conference paper so it doesn’t have a clear description of method. The study is called a case study (p. 2), but methods of data collection and analysis are not described.

Findings:
It seems mostly a discussion format was used for the videoconferences, and the two professors team-facilitated the discussions.

The participants learned from each other’s different perspectives. One class was comprised of mainly graduate students who were already teaching; while the other class had mainly graduate students who had not yet taught or were not teaching at the same time as taking the class. These different perspectives added to the quality of the discussion and learning from both sides.

The students were able to gain the advantage of having two professors without putting a strain on either university’s resources.

The double class size due to the videoconference afforded a wider perspective and more interesting discussions.

There were some challenges including some audio problems, one night one site had a blue screen the whole time (even universities have firewall problems!) A few times one university would “take over” the conversation and they had to adjust procedures to make sure the conversation was well rounded from both sides. Some mic issues included hearing side conversations and fidgeting noises, so muting the microphone was used to resolve that.

Author/Audience:
The authors are university education professors and they were presenting to an educational technology conference of K-20 educators.

Questions/Thoughts/Implications:

We can’t say that higher education isn’t trying to expose teacher education students to technology, that’s for sure. You may have your doubts about the university close to you, but there are definitely professors trying to expose pre-service teachers to current educational technologies. Yeah for them!!

I wonder if they experimented with any specific pedagogical techniques to make the instruction and discussion varied and interesting between the sites. I’m thinking of strategies by Carol Fleck and Kim Perry who presented at the Keystone Conference in 2004.

This is a great example of collaboration at the university level, and a model for team-teaching as a specific type of collaborative videoconferences.

Five Interdisciplinary Goals for Global Education

In working on my literature review, I ran across a reference to this paper. Thankfully, it’s been shared online so you can read the whole article if you wish.

Hanvey, R. (1977). An attainable global perspective. New York: The American Forum for Global Education.

The paper suggests there are five interdisciplinary goals for global education: (a) perspective consciousness, (b) state of planet awareness, (c) cross-cultural awareness, (d) systematic awareness, and (e) options for participation (Hanvey, 1977).

I thought it would be interesting to see how we’re using videoconferencing to meet some of these goals.

Perspective Consciousness
Which basically means, are you conscious of the fact that other people have other perspectives?

  • Global Nomads programs certainly address these issues, especially the Pulse programs which explore differing opinions on hot topics.
  • The misconceptions program we did in April began to raise this awareness for the middle school students involved.

State of the Planet Awareness
This includes an awareness of current events, conflicts, etc. around the world.

  • Many schools have current or world events classes and the Internet makes this study a lot easier.
  • Global Nomads programs again are amazing to help students be “onsite” in the country learning from students their age what life is really like for them. The recent programs from Kenya on the elections are a great example of this.
  • Eco-Conversations, brought increased environmental understanding from a global perspective to Dowagiac students this page school year. We intend to run it again next year, and you are welcome to replicate the project too if you wish.
  • What about how our students reacted to the earthquake in Pakistan a few years ago?

Cross Cultural Awareness
Can surface contact via videoconference raise awareness? Can it bring deeper understanding? Certainly it’s not like living in the culture for a year or more. However at least it’s the beginning of teaching students that others have different values and perspectives. Some potential examples include:

In addition, I think the research by Lee and Cifuentes get at the challenges of moving to the higher levels of cross-cultural understanding described in Hanvey’s paper.

Systematic Awareness
This one is harder. I couldn’t think of an example of a videoconference that starts to address this goal. Can you? This is the definition from the paper:

some modest comprehension of key trails and mechanisms of the world system, with emphasis on theories and concepts that may increase intelligent consciousness of global change

Options for Participation
This one is more difficult too, but I think the recent Videoconference for Hope hosted by schools in Edmonton, Alberta is one possibility.

What do you think? Have you done an international videoconference? Did it meet any of these goals for global education? How will this article change or inform your next international videoconference?

Diffusion of Innovations

Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of innovations (4th ed.). New York: Free Press. Quoted in this article:

Rogers (1995) suggests that there are five factors related to the nature of innovations and their rate of adoption: relative advantage, the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supercedes; compatibility, the extent to which it is consistent with existing values, experiences, and needs of adopters; complexity, how difficult it is to use and understand; trialability, the degree to which it can be experimented with on a limited basis; and observability, the degree to which the results of the innovation are visible to others.

So, how do you think videoconferencing is doing?

  • Relative advantage: What idea does VC supercede? For course delivery, it’s the face to face instructor, right? For curriculum videoconferencing, it’s the field trip, right? Is that advantage strong enough? Do people perceive it as better?
  • Compatibility: Is VC compatible with our values and experiences? in what ways? how does it meet the needs to adopters?
  • Complexity: I think we have a ways to go yet on this one. Just read this blog post: “Does it have to be so formal and complicated?”
  • Trialability: Hmm. How would you experiment with VC on a limited basis before you decided??? You can watch some videos maybe, but it’s pretty hard to just try it out.
  • Observability: Certainly other teachers in the building know when you’re using it or not; but do others interested in educational technology know about it? I think we still have a way to go in this area as well.

I think this theory does show some of the challenges to videoconferencing becoming a mainstream technology. Do you agree? What do you think?